KING CRIMSON

Discipline/Beat/Three Of A Perfect Pair PANEGYRIC

SOUNDS LIKE NOTHING ELSE IN THE KING CRIMSON CANON.

Early 80s Crimson get the heavy duty vinyl reissue treatment.

It’s hard to imagine now the impact and confusion that Discipline – the first album of this otherworldly early 80s King Crimson trilogy – would have caused among the fannish cognoscenti when Robert Fripp reanimated the group in 1981. Crimson had ‘ceased to exist’ in 1974 as their talismanic leader pursued his spiritual studies at Sherborne House, though when he did finally re-emerge with only Bill Bruford from the Red album line-up, the regenerated version bore very little resemblance to its lean and heavy predecessor.

Discipline, Beat and Three Of A Perfect Pair sound like nothing else in the progressive rock canon or the King Crimson canon for that matter; a trio of New York-centric, post-punk, soul-pop, Beat-infused, gamelan-influenced records that took from their surroundings while somehow sounding completely out of time. And now they’re available for the first time on 200g vinyl with the stereo Steven Wilson and Robert Fripp mixes that came out on CD for the 40th anniversary series in 2009. Wilson certainly proves his worth on sonic urban nightmare Thela Hun Ginjeet, separating the channels with a deftness that still unleashes the madness while maintaining some kind of civic order.

That these albums got made at all – and with the same line-up of Fripp, Belew, Bill Bruford, and Tony Levin on bass and Chapman Stick – is a miracle in itself. Beat, a concept album about the Beat writers which followed up Discipline’s shock-of-the-new impact, was, according to Belew, the toughest record he ever had the misfortune to make, a punishing ordeal with the hardest of taskmasters – he’s since claimed the experience did for his hair. It’s perhaps the most commercial offering of the set, with the addition of tracks like Two Hands and Heartbeat, though sporadic Arabic-tinged jazz fusion instrumentals like Sartori In Tangier offset any Stinginflected torch balladry.

Three Of A Perfect Pair, a record that normally gets short shrift, is a fascinating album viewed from the future, where Hall & Oates-style soul pop songwriting coexists with a whole side of multitextured instrumental sonic explorations that come into their own thanks to the renewed attention paid to them in the editing suite.

Now this trio all stand alone together, beautiful anomalies hermetically sealed in the same time canister, made from blood, sweat, tears and dexterity. If there were ever any misgivings about these albums it’s because they were misapprehensions. Those are confined to the past, as this reissue package elevates these records to the place they deserve to be.