KING CRIMSON

Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With/ Level Five /EleKtriK PANEGYRIC Three CD set of studio and live releases from the early 2000s.

The music in this three-disc collection dates from around the time of 2003’s The Power To Believe, which is still King Crimson’s most recent studio album. Released the previous year, the 34-minute mini album, Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With introduced early versions of some of the music that would appear on the later album, together with unreleased material. It represented the second set of studio recordings made after Bill Bruford and Tony Levin had quit the double trio, leaving Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew on guitars, Pat Mastelotto on drums and Trey Gun on Warr guitar and bass guitar.

It’s a curious collection, linked by Adrian Belew’s a cappella treated vocal fragments. The title track is one of Belew’s lyrical tongue twisters, which was re-recorded for the album. There’s an acoustic version of Eyes Wide Open, the gamelanlike instrumental ShoGaNai, the bluesy outtake Potato Pie,

and an irksome collage of studio chat and music, Einstein’s Relatives. The record also includes, anomalously, a live take on Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Pt. IV (from 2000’s The ConstruKction Of Light), one of the most cold-eyed and brutal compositions Fripp ever came up with.

King Crimson’s music has always maintained a balance between their angular instrumental structures, and ballads and near-pop songs. Into the new millennium these different, but related, approaches seemed to be drifting apart from each other. The two live sets – Level Five from 2001 and EleKtriK

recorded in Japan in 2003 – serve to reinforce that view.

These versions include the graceful rhythmic pirouettes and intricate guitar lattice work of The ConstruKction Of Light and Virtuous Circle, an outtake from The Power To Believe built on a repeated bass line, which develops through an ambient beginning to a dense amalgam of guitars and electronics. By comparison, some of Adrian Belew’s songs such as ProzaKc Blues feel overcooked, while the breezy One Time sounds rather out of place in this heavyweight company.

It’s interesting to compare the way that the composition Level Five is presented here and on the myriad live albums since 2016 by the current seven-piece incarnation. The recent reimagining has greater instrumental colour and also the polyrhythmic contribution of the three drummers. But to hear this earlier version played with such industrial-strength focus by the quartet, Belew’s guitar whinnying and spiralling away from a guitar chord sequence that sounds like rivetedtogether steel plates, is a visceral, thrilling experience – prog’s heavy, heavy monster sound.

VISCERAL, THRILLING – PROG’S HEAVY, HEAVY MONSTER SOUND.