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King Crimson - Islands CD (album) cover

ISLANDS

King Crimson

 

Eclectic Prog

3.85 | 2202 ratings

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OT Räihälä
2 stars Islands is the weakest album in King Crimson's early output. I've given this album a lot of time, but it won't blossom.

There are six tracks on this album, and even if none of them is really bad, none of them is anything special either. The album opens with "Formentera Lady", which is way too long for its material. The song uses a lot of pentatonic scale, which sounds a bit infantile. The next track, "Sailor's Tale", is the best on the album. In "Ladies Of The Road" Peter Sinfield tells us how rock stars score with women... the song is a bastard child of The Beatles's "Michelle" and "Come Together" - I wonder if the Crimson members noticed this when they wrote the track...

"Prelude: Song Of The Gulls" is a beautiful little piece with strings and oboe. Typically among rock musicians, in its beauty this is terribly banal, much in the way of other similar stuff like Deep Purple's Concerto For Group And Orchestra. The last track, "Islands" shows a nice trumpet, but offers very little compared with a few of Crimson's early masterpieces.

What I find really annoying is that King Crimson adds mindless noise to the end of a few of their songs. It has no musical substance whatsoever, and I can't think of why they do this, because the tracks are already long enough without it.

OT Räihälä | 2/5 |

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