DISCIPLINE

One of the best songs on this album is the instrumental title track, whose mechanical math-rock underpinnings are a good summary of all three of the band's 1980s albums. So it's doubly odd that "Discipline" would be the final track of Discipline.

But the way the entire album is sequenced is odd. Although the most accessible songs appear early, the spoken-word opener "Elephant Talk" is probably not the way to hook casual listeners. But it's a fair warning of what's to come. "Elephant Talk" is the only Discipline song with stream-of-consciousness spoken words over a somewhat conventional instrumental song structure, but most of the album juxtaposes convention and contravention.

There are only two songs which approach traditional pop form: "Frame by Frame" and "Matte Kudasai." Maybe that's why these are two of my favorites here. After a one-minute introduction, "Frame By Frame" follows an A-B structure (verse 1 - instrumental - verse 1 again - instrumental again). The final fifty seconds mirrors the introduction. The haunting "Matte Kudasai" has an even more traditional verse-chorus form, and if longtime King Crimson fans didn't lament its near-poppiness, it might have been because its undeniably lovely melody.

Perhaps to the relief of some of those fans, each 1980s King Crimson has its circumambulatory, experimental pieces. Here that box is checked with "Indiscipline" and "The Sheltering Sky." I would've preferred to have these songs, along with their Beat (1982) and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984) counterparts, consolidated on a single album, kind of like what the group did with Space Groove in 1998. But i suspect that on this point, I'm in the minority among prog-rock fans.

So Discipline is a proverbial mixed bag, including three very good songs, and two which I skip over every time. Definitely a three-star album: "good, but not essential."