The most progressive album by KC.

This, in no way, was to suggest that any other album by KC was not important, or valuable.

But, in many ways, it tells you one thing, that we're not studying well (in my book!), and that is the time and place that it came out. By the time that "Red", "Starless" and "Lark's" came out, the importance factor of the work they were doing, was not as socially relevant as the original album, and a lot of this music got lost in the shuffle of "fame" by many other bands, and we even had folks at one station comment in Santa Barbara, about how pretentious those albums were, which I do not think they are at all.

But it's value, in terms of its social commentary, disguised as romantic poetry (that's how we look at it today!!! -- we can't remember or conceive of the reality behind it!), the album is very strong and still stands out today, and is quite visible in the current, and possibly last shows EVER, by King Crimson, when the two gigantic pieces are played and one of them is the closer complete with a far out drum solo with the 3 drummers. I'm not sure that one can emphasize things any better, about their strength and value!

I also love Red and One More Nightmare from Red. Mostly because of Bill Bruford.

Some songs of the debut, I find quite nice, but I never really play it. It has no soul at all. I think Moody Blues and Barclay James Harvest succeed much better at mellotron based symphonic rock.

But the albums that please me the most are Discipline and Beat. Wow, thank god for Levin, Belew and  Bruford for finally making something coherent, groovy and even soulful and tongue-in-cheek with the material of Fripp.

 

Just like many 70's progrockbands I enjoy the 80's stuff the best. Also Thrak and Vrooom are great. Bud Discipline is maybe the best thing Fripp was ever involved in.

Recently I was thinking about how it succeeds in being epic and innovative while each track is basically a song, with defined verses.  It was in some ways a lot simpler and more accessible than the albums by the other big prog bands of that time (well, by definition, a year or two later).  To some extent they continued this through Mach 1 anyway.   Each album has at least a couple of "songs"