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King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King CD (album) cover

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING

King Crimson

 

Eclectic Prog

4.64 | 4724 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

AA
5 stars Does this album really need another review? Does its magnificence need another supporter? I don't think so, really. Let's just pretend that this is being read by somebody who doesn't know anything about KC, or progrock, and happens to be in this site for the first time. It's very simple: this is THE progressive rock album, the one who defined the genre as pseudo-intellectual rambling of musical prowess, filled with passion, technique, and lyricism. Of course, we know that ProgRock is so much more than that, and there are so many different bands who are hard to compare to the mighty Crim. I mean, the mighty Crim's carreer itself is hardly comparable to this very album, musicwise they drifted away from it pretty quickly. Yet there it stays, as a monumental milestone, THE progressive album which is praised outside proghead's circles, the one you'll find in best-of-lists. It is hard to portray in words the mystic aura this album has. It is so gorundbreaking it feels other-wordly as of today. its production, some may say dated, stays hauntingly charming. its playing... if you're a musician of any kind, you can't help but to be amazed on everything that goes on in here. and man, THAT cover. i'm sure that design helped to sell an awful lot of copies. Historicaly, this album is the nightmare at the end of the 60's dream. It is its bad trip. One might argue that Morrison & co. were already dealing with the dark side of it all. But lyrically they were still singing about love, sex, rock n' roll, dreams, albeit in very dark tones, Sinfield (what a name!) instead seems to have vomited on paper all his dark fantasies, all his childhood nightmares, all his paranoids, and created something unique. As I've already said, you can hardly call this a King Crimson album. There's almost no trace of Fripp's hypnotic and angular guitar. The drumming is very un-Crimson-y too, bordering on typical jazz drums. (But then again, that's why the Crims are so amazing. You have this, then you have Discipline. You have Islands, then you have Larks. Talking about resting on your laurels.) But I'm digressing. Track by track reviewing sounds ridicolous with albums like these. It's all a single magnificent journey. (By the way, Moonchild is brilliant).

This is one of the freshest musical experiences this century had to offer, one of the very few ones that transcend its genre, its format, its period and enter a domain of eternal recognition and adoration. If you fail to grasp its greatness,no problem, but try again. It will hit you sooner or later, just as, say, Picasso or Herriman eventually will. It is THAT good.

AA | 5/5 |

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