HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU HAVE TO BE HAPPY WITH

In 2002, King Crimson released a new EP: Happy with What You Have to Be Happy With. This release was recorded by the same lineup as ConstruKction, and it was meant to serve the same purpose as VROOOM: to act as a teaser for the upcoming full-length. Two of the songs here would appear on their next album, and there is also one live recording. 

"Bude" is a 26-second intro of synthesized vocals that leads into the title track, which is nearly identical to the version on The Power to Believe.

"Mie Gakuri" is an airy instrumental interlude of wavering synth pads, "She Shudders" is another piece just like "Bude", and "Eyes Wide Open" is a gentle bit of folky jazz-rock. It's a pleasant little piece, and hearing King Crimson unplug for one song is a nice change of pace for the band. An electrified version of this piece appears on The Power to Believe. This is followed by "Shoganai", an instrumental consisting solely of peculiar percussion reminiscent of a gamelan. I like it.

"I Ran" is yet another little synth-vocal piece. This is followed by "Potato Pie", probably King Crimson's bluesiest song. It still has some of that King Crimson strangeness, but it's quite straightforward by this band's standards. This song is decent, but really nothing special.

A live recording of "Larks' Tongues in Aspic (Part IV)" comes next, and this takes up about one-third of the EP's runtime. It is, as expected, a powerful, aggressive performance, but its placement on this disc feels a bit like padding.

The last track here is "Clouds", one final synth-vocal interlude. It's only 30 seconds long, but following a 30-second silence, the hidden track "Einstein's Relatives" begins. (Man, I really do not miss hidden tracks being a thing. CDs have their uses, but unwieldy digital files with a minute of silence in the middle were not fun to deal with on iPod back when I was in high school.) After a brief, sped-up, one-man reprise of the title track, it wanders about rather aimlessly. There are a bunch of disjointed ideas, studio chatter, and general dicking-about. It feels like a piss take, and it really doesn't offer much of interest.

Despite having some good ideas, this is quite the skippable release. I'm annoyed it wasn't available to stream anywhere, so I had to spend a few dollars to buy a CD off Discogs. (This was actually one of four CDs I had to buy (along with VROOOM and ProjeKcts Two and X), but this was the most disappointing of the bunch. This one couldn't even rip properly. And of course as I was formatting this, I found it actually is on YouTube, just with a truncated name that made it easy to overlook.)

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2024/04/15/deep-dive-king-crimson/