LIZARD

King Crimson

Eclectic Prog

4.13 | 2476 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Life isn't perfect and neither is the music of prog gods, King Crimson. Robert Fripp's 23-minute epic Lizard beginning with Prince Rupert's awakening has Jon Anderson singing the opening verse and chorus. Keith Tippet's piano moves it along till a lone trombone retraces the main theme in Peacock's Tale and then cor anglaise and cornet joins in. The classical theme mutates into interludes of jazz playing by the horn section before the piano returns to close it out. The Battle of the Glass Tears is where is all unravels with the strange decision to have Gordon Haskell sing the next section. Suddenly the music gets all threatening with saxes, horns and Mellotron contrasting to the atmosphere of the opening. Difficult to know where it is all going to end up. This is Van de Graaf generator, not King Crimson. Minutes of kettle drum and synthesizer and silences we get to the finish with a cacophonic burst of the circus big top.

Having got that out the way, the first side of Lizard is everything the second side isn't, a master class of neat intricate compositions of wonderful rock-jazz playing. The opener Cirkus, starts off with piano and develops into acoustic guitar and Mellotron in the middle section. The song is very dark and Gordon Haskell's voice perfectly suits the tone of the song. Mel Collins' sax playing acts a counterpoint to the dark theme and the use of Fripp's Mellotron is signature in the sound he manages to produce with the horn section.

Indoor Games is a fun piece, very jazzy, also very avant garde and again, Gordon Haskell, who isn't the best singer in the world, has the perfect voice to execute the song. Sax, acoustic guitar and electric guitar jam around each other in a type of dance before synths, more sax, drums and acoustic guitar and laughter finishes off the song.

Happy Family is another great song, also very avant garde and jazzy. This time it's the piano which improvises around the flute playing and horns before it gets really heavy towards the end when the voices finish it off.

Lady of the Dancing Water is a break from the heaviness of the jazz playing with acoustic guitar and flute and Haskell's gentle voice tempering the pace of the first side as a bridge into the Lizard suite.

Special mention to the album cover which draws attention to the Circus themes of the album. This should be an easy album to rate, 3-stars for the second side and 5-stars for the first side, so rounded out to 4-stars, but it's not that simple. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Lizard is that album which is hard to define because of its uniqueness in the King Crimson cannon. It belongs in the bracket of albums below the great trilogy of albums that begin with Larks' Tongues in Aspic. Nevertheless, despite its flaws it's a 5-star masterpiece to me.

iluvmarillion | 5/5 | 2020-8-5

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