Three Friends vs. Lizard

Busy Lizzie

Lizard. Three Friends is one of my least favorite GG albums from that period.

Love The Giant, but definitely Lizard. It's an album I've lived with for a long time. It's always felt like little else out there in the world. And it has seemed greater and greater to me with every year.

socrates17 wrote: Lizard.  For one thing, Lizard ranks higher among my favorite KC albums than Three Friends does among my favorite GG albums.

This is a very good album match-up, I think, and both rank amongst my very favourite albums by each band. If "both" were an option then I would go with that, but I gave it to Lizard particularly for the suite. Over the last few years, Lizard and Islands have been the KC albums I've turned to the most.

Hercules wrote: Three Friends is great. Lizard isn't.

You're in good, or bad depending upon one's perspective, company.

I disagree with both you and Fripp (rather like I disagree with Waters and Gilmour's comments on Atom Heart Mother).

An interesting article about this divisive album (mostly divisive when it comes to KC fans methinks of which you are not, mind you:
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/king-crimson-lizard/

Better to read the article in full at the site, but here are excerpts from the article which quote Fripp:

From Ryan Reed's article at ultimateclassicrock.com wrote: "Overall, the album is unlistenable," King Crimson maestro Robert Fripp once said of Lizard, the prog-rock institution's divisive third LP. Many fans agree, and understandably so: Arriving after the band's Earth-shattering debut, 1969's In the Court of the Crimson King, and its sturdy if unsurprising 1970 sequel In the Wake of Poseidon, Lizard feels downright insane – full of dissonant grooves and free-jazz woodwind chaos, it's the photo negative of their studious early work. ... Unsurprisingly, Fripp isn't fond of the multi-part suite, particularly the opening section. "Rupert would have done better to stay in bed that day," the guitarist wrote in 1999 on the DGM website. "Jon Anderson has sung the unsingable: neither melody writer nor lyricist helped him on this one. An early edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (from any good secondhand bookshop) is an essential aid to interpreting the lyrics." He did muster praise for "Bolero," writing, "This is the only part of the album I am able to remember with anything other than fear, terror, misery and suffering. ... The main theme, played on oboe by Robin Miller (co-principal oboist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under [conductor Pierre] Boulez at the time) is a gift. This is a melody which sustained me in difficult times." Mostly, though, Fripp would prefer to squash Lizard. "Lots of ideas, mostly presented simultaneously and very few of which work," [Fripp] wrote. "Various bits are unsure whether to try and make connection with a unified central theme, or maintain their independence. Mostly, the search for a unified central theme escapes satisfaction, and the constituent elements adopt a semblance of neutrality, so as not to attract culpability for their involvement. Labor and laboring, mostly joyless, strive effortfully to present the appearance of cohesion." "I am unable to recommend that anyone part with their hard-earned pay for this one, unless they want to take it to parties and play it at unwelcome guests," he [Fripp] concluded. "There are some Lizard lovers, I know. They must be very strange."

I am very strange, and the older I get the more comfortable I am with not hiding my own eccentricities and appreciation for the strange.

A toss up.  Both masterpieces for me...took me months to fully appreciate Lizard where I loved Three Friends on the 1st listen.  Today the vote goes to Three Friends, though tomorrow it just might be Lizard 

Lizard.  For one thing, Lizard ranks higher among my favorite KC albums than Three Friends does among my favorite GG albums.

Three Friends.

Two long lasting favorites containing some of prog's absolute peaks for me = Prologue/Schooldays and the Lizard-multipart suite. Gave my vote to the latter as there's very little in all of music that transcends me to some kind of dreamy, fairytaleish universe... you know quite like the lazy & misunderstood parody of what prog is supposed to be about for all those boring rockers who loathes it - I guess.     

Three Friends is great.