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King Crimson - Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With CD (album) cover

HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU HAVE TO BE HAPPY WITH

King Crimson

 

Eclectic Prog

3.42 | 110 ratings

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Malve87
3 stars Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With is not simply an EP which shows us King Crimson's work in progress for their "The Power To Believe" album, but a record that grace us with some interesting brand new material.

Tracks such as "Eyes Wide Open" or "Happy with what you have to be happy with", in the end, made it to the studio album in 2003, but then again these versions are not the same: the first one, infact, is an acoustic version, which is interesting, in the lights of the comparison with the original version which everybody knows; the second one is an "edit" version, slightly shorter than the "Power to believe" one.

This record is double linked to King Crimson's 2000 album "The Contrukction Of Light": firstly by a superbe live version of "Lark's Tongues In Aspic (Part IV)" presented here without any vocal parts, in the "Coda" section and also thanks to "Potato Pie", a tune which is nothing more than a blues, seen from King Crimson point of view, just like "Prozakc Blues".

The cd also contains some simple, but incredibly attractive, "vocoder" improvvisations by Adrian Belew such as "Bude", "She Shudders", "I Ran" and "Clouds" : four "a cappella" compositions in which kind of surreal- enigmatic lyrics are spoken.

The weakest point of the work to me is the quite useless and boring track "Shoganai", a short instrumental piece that not raise interest. Better track "Mie Gakure" a typical Fripp soundscape.

A ghost track, called "Einstein Relatives", can be heard in the end and it's a nice mix of demos and improvvisated bits and spoken voices recorded in the studio.

The three stars definition fits: good, but non essential.

Malve87 | 3/5 |

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