DISCIPLINE

After "Red", a despondent and jaded Robert Fripp declared the end of King Crimson. It seemed then that one of the seminal and fundamental chapters of progressive rock was over. But, once again, as all that could be expected from the band is the unexpected, seven years later the Crimson bird surprisingly rises from the ashes with "Discipline", their eighth album.

The umpteenth mutation of the band comes with a more modernised production, with the innovative Frippertronics, a device created by Fripp's labyrinthine mind, which generates a sound loop using his guitar as an ally and creates a repetition effect related to the electronic and the nascent new wave movement, with the also innovative bass-guitar "Chapman Stick" of the recently incorporated Tony Levin, both of them standing out in several passages of the album, as in the satirical "Elephant Talk", a critique of the talk show culture and the opinionated media, in the tense "Frame by Frame", or in the anecdotal and funky "Thela Hun Ginjeet", all songs guided by the insidious voice of Adrian Belew, ex-collaborator of David Byrne's Talking Heads.

And the album's brief space for reflection with the gentle "Matte Kudasai" and its arpeggiated description of warm landscapes is only a respite to give way to the band's most recognisable side, experimentation as an imperious need to express itself, with the aggressive and unbridled "Indiscipline", the stratospheric ramblings of Fripp's synthesised guitar accompanied by Bill Bruford's infinite and hypnotic Central African wooden drumming in the mystical "The Sheltering Sky", and the balanced "Discipline", with a persistent Fripp again taking the lead at the helm of his Frippertronics accompanied by the band's measured instrumental support. A disciplined closing...

"Discipline" marks a new beginning for King Crimson, with an album that, beyond its need not to pigeonhole itself with anything in particular, begins to incorporate into its style the trends that the decade of the 80's brought with it.

Very good.

3.5/4 stars