EntertheLemming - The Destruction of Light and Shade -

I've never been much of an audiophile as the production on a record very rarely impacts to any great degree on my enjoyment of any given release. However, the 'Construkction of Light' might just be the one instance where my vandalised ears are less than well disposed to forgive such disruptive building work. This critter is wearying and exhausting to listen to in one sitting. Whether this is a case of over zealous compression or what sounds like the drummer chiselling his beats via Pro-Tools on a concrete kit is open to debate. A shame really, as the majority of material on this Crimson millennium issue is exemplary. We've all I'm sure been an unwilling party to those fidelity discussions with hirsute plankton who exclaim:

'Yeah, but the 30th anniversary edition is 24 bit remastered in Dolby at double speed plus FIVE bonus tracks so you wont recognise it as the same album dude'

You mean to the extent that the notes and the order they are played in changes?(and 'Caveat Emptor' with 'previously unreleased' status folks, these freebies didn't see the light of day for good reason i.e. their creators usually thought they weren't worthy of release)

Prozakc Blues - The 'k' 'k'onceit indulged in at around this time ir'K's this 'K'orrespondent to distra'k'tion. Enough already. As the title indicates, we have a blues capsule, but one piloted by the crew of the red fiery brigade. As on 'Pictures of a City', Crimson manage to invest some primordial harmonic gravity with some unnerving weightlessness when they step outside the pressurised (wood) cabin of the idiom. Belew's vocal is pitch shifted downwards to authentic effect in imitation of a 21st Century Schizoid 'Leadbelly' on a visit to his long suffering Doctor:

'Well I woke up this morning in a cloud of despair, I ran my hand across my head Pulled out a pile of worried hair.I went to my physician who was buried in his thoughts He said son, you've been reading too much Elephant Talk'

There is more than a trace of genre parody and caustic bile in Adrian's delivery here and his swipe at a Crimson internet discussion forum, although seemingly churlish, is well founded (even a casual visit will confirm said appreciation society as a nest of infertile W.A.S.P.s with Conan the Librarian as moderator which makes even 'PA' look like a sanctuary of reasoned calm) The aforementioned 'concrete' percussion does not mercifully spoil this track, as the rather unfocused pounding sludge of the pulse is consistent with the blues effect intended. A great and funny song that should be played to blues purists everywhere as an example of why so much of their music is tantamount to a dusty museum piece roped off from the threat of innovation.

The Construkction of Light - Although ostensibly split into two parts the demarcation is frankly spurious as the whole she-boodle segues seamlessly into one whole. The accuracy demanded from the twin guitars of Fripp and Belew on this piece must be harrowing to negotiate as the compositional device of harmonised parts that appear to mimic a shifting temporal delay as the piece develops allow precisely zero margin for error. A similar albeit inferior effect could be conjured up via a digital delay set for the appropriate time division, but performing such feats 'manually' as they do so expertly here simply beggars belief. As dry and academic as that might sound, rest assured that like all Crimson's most challenging music, there is a hard-nosed beauty here that somehow conspires to be neither sentimental or cerebrally sterile. Belew's memorable and brilliantly executed lyrical section helps greatly in this regard by alleviating the daunting complexity with a more accessible hook:

'And if a bird can speak, who once was a dinosaur and a dog can dream, should it be implausible that a man might supervise the construction of light?'

(I said more accessible, not catchy all right?)

Into the Frying Pan - Can't seem to shake off the conviction that this startling song is inspired by the Beatles (as risible as that might first appear) as it strikes me as closely akin to one of the Fab Four's early pop ditties but with Crimson as the backing band and William Burroughs permitted to sit in the cut-up producer's chair? Beguiling and intriguing for sure as it threatens to collapse into incoherence at any given moment but miraculously still delivers its melodic bounty despite the insistent chaos clamouring at the gates.

FraKctured - There is a marked tendency in some previous reviews to propose that the Crims are vainly revisiting past glories on their adaptations of prior works ? I think this judgement completely facile as evidenced by the verdant new pastures that such sacred cows are led to willingly or otherwise. For the most part the 'moto perpetuo' of the original is preserved here but this fragile and feisty creature is mutated and burnished into a new shiny metallic biomechanoid as befitting a shape shifting replicant. (with big sharp pointy teeth to gobble you up with my dear)

The World's My Oyster Soup Kitchen Floor Wax Museum - A playful lyrical device yes, but we all dallied with our own crayoned version of the Surrealists 'Exquisite Corpse' as kids. Perhaps the weakest of the conventional songs on 'Construkction of Light', but certainly not remotely shoddy or slapdash (despite the band's futile efforts in any failed realisation of a rehearsed spontaneity)

Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part IV - Once again, Fripp and Co still display an endearing affection for demarcation as testimony to conceptual rigour. The discrete partitioning of the three sections is more a hindrance to clarity than an aid but we have in our now hot little lap 8 minutes of implacable, neurotic and downright cussing Crimson that for the most part, is on a par with any of their instrumental pieces of the past. It does drag a tad towards the end though and you are always grateful for the appearance of the album's tail-ender when it finally uncloaks itself from the retreating carnage overhead.

Coda: I Have A Dream - A very powerful and sincere song penned by Belew which catalogues some of the worst tragedies that have afflicted the modern age. I think the author has chosen wisely to avoid imparting his own conclusions here, as the nature of the destructive losses he itemises should relegate any whining liberal angst as superfluous to help the medicine go down. Kudos to Adrian for that restraint. There was an interesting acoustic version of this number available for free download from Belew's website. (Not sure if you can still get it?)

Heaven and Earth - The token bonus track that most of us would not move same for to ever hear again. My hopelessly prejudiced view relegates anything remotely 'ambient' as suitable only for the purposes of providing a soundtrack for a flotation tank. Like so much of the Projekcts output, we are expected to allow ourself to drift away to wherever this music takes us. Me ?, I much prefer to surrender to the inevitable that gravity holds all the aces in this hole.

Under normal circumstances the 'Construkction of Light' would warrant an unhesitating 4 sparklies from this habitually grudging rodent but for the reasons I alluded to in the introduction, cannot give anything other than three and a half dwarf stars. Mastellotto is a very fine drummer with a portfolio that others who man the traps would kill for, but his kit sounds bear an uncanny semblance to those that would emanate from industrial strength Tupperware being bludgeoned into submission with iron bars. Similarly, the slinky and sinuous bass of Gunn and the guitars are smothered in a quick drying glue that robs the playing of what dynamic elasticity it may have possessed at the outset. However despite such provisos, please don't confuse the medium with the message as there is much fine music on this album that should be coaxed out of its dark hidey hole on a Fripp remastering job.

How about it Bob?

Warthur King Crimson have always done their absolute best work when they have both a stable lineup and a compelling musical vision to lend cohesiveness to the compositions. For their first phase (from In the Court... to Islands) they had the vision but not the stable lineup, so whilst the debut album was fabulous the next three were a little hit-and-miss - though thanks to the musical vision expressed they were always interesting.

Then you have the glorious mid-1970s phase, where the stable core of Wetton, Bruford and Fripp gave a bedrock of stability and the band pursued a new, raw musical direction which paid massive dividends. And, of course, after that you have the 1980s incarnation of the band, which held a rock-solid lineup for its three albums and once again had an intriguing musical direction to follow.

I guess this is why the post-THRAK reincarnation of the band has little interest for me, because it enjoys neither a stable lineup nor a particularly interesting or revolutionary musical direction. See, for instance, The ConstruKction of Light, recorded following the collapse of THRAK's double trio lineup. Songs like ProzaKc Blues and The World's My Oyster... seem to show a somewhat flippant approach to the album, almost as though the band themselves couldn't take the project seriously, and the tedious attempts at recycling old ideas from the band's heyday go nowhere.

At around this time Fripp was quite taken with the whole ProjeKct idea, which was an attempt to use the fluctuating and unstable lineups of Crimson as an advantage rather than a weakness, but to be honest I've never heard anything from the ProjeKcts that struck me as being more than a fun but unsatisfying diversion and it seems with ConstruKction the core band itself wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders either.

It's a real shame, because I had respected Fripp's habit of breaking up King Crimson when there was no reason for it to exist and only resurrecting it when he felt that there was a particular need to take a Crimsonian approach to an album. The ConstruKction of Light stands as proof that this approach, by 2000, was long-dead: it's King Crimson existing and plodding on simply for the sake of being King Crimson, without any consideration of whether there's any need for King Crimson right now.

Sean Trane The double trio era only lasted so long, and by the turn off the century/millennium, Crimson was reduced to a quartet, but not exactly the one wished for. Indeed both Bruford and Levin are gone, but it didn't really appear as a permanent move back then, because as the title indicates, this album is a bit the continuation of the different ProjeKcts discs/albums, which saw many different formations of the double-trio line-ups, some without Fripp. Rest assured Fripp is still part of this KC line-up, but then again, this album is so heavy (as in slow and heaeaeavyyyyyyy >> weighs like a ton in your ears) that you'd wish he wasn't part of it. But he is, and there is no mistaking about it: Half the tracks sound like rehash of Crafty League of Gentlemen or his other forms acoustic guitar clubs, while the rest can be linked with the Wetton-era Crimson, mainly on the huge riffing. Hiding behind a construction of eclipse light artwork filled with grey and midnight blue, if Trey Gunn holds its own, I find that Matselotto's drumming very average, if not downright shocking at times. Hey, Bill, I'll double your wages....

Beyond the atrocious ProzaKc Blues, probably the most indigestible Crimson track ever, the title track, which besides its weird intro is a Crafty League work, while tracks like Frying Pan or Oyster Soup are more reminiscent of Thrakk or Red, partly due to the huge riffs, but in Frying Pan, the drums is definitely not Bruford's!! I doubt Bill would've dared such an ordinary binary pattern and the rest of the band being so obtuse, sounding like a troubled muddied soup.

Of course FraKctured can only draw comparisons with the SABB instrumental, rightly so, there are similarities and familiarities, enough to wonder what would be the point of reworking this piece outside of a live setting and releasing it as a studio track. Nevertheless, this is probably my fave track on this album, especially in the quieter arpeggios, where you'd swear Phillips Rutherford where around. In the same manner Lark's part IV can only draw comparisons with the first three, and you know it will, so the album is forcibly taking an upward curve. Linked to this rework is a weird short Coda, where Belew's dreams of peace find some sonic support, but it's a bit too bad it's all too distorted byeffects. But on another side this avoids Belew sounding like the pretentious bono. Only the closing Heaven and Earth and its ultra repetitive riff with a mellotron outro

Not really Crimson's best album (almost the opposite), I find TCOL is relying too much on elements of the past (and most notably winking at the Wetton-era) with these two elongated tracks. The real fresh material is left to be found in the excrutiatingly bad opener and in the so-called ProjeKct X trazck that closes the album.