Three Of A Perfect Pair [Remastered] - King Crimson > Reviews > The Elephant Talks Beautifully

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Groundbreaking
Lyrics	Thought-provoking
Quality and consistency of tracks	A couple of weak links
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Outstanding
Value for Money

Advantages:	It's King Crimon  -  what more must I say?
Disadvantages:	well, not really keen on Elephant Talk

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

There is something ethereal and occasionally ephemeral about music and to some it is as necessary as air and to others as good as superfluous. At times it moves us and at other times it leaves us cold. With Discipline my first listen occurred upon returning home from university and sitting at home in the front room with the CD on repeat and I thought “this is good but it’s rather repetitive.” At this point I was only a minor King Crimson fan and not so well versed as I would become. I returned back to university and began to listen to Discipline once again only to wonder what planet I inhabited when I thought that Discipline sounded all the same. Suddenly the music flourished, it expanded; I came upon a moment of recognition. This was a great album and I was well and truly hooked.

Discipline marked the first album for Crimson after a seven year hiatus, with a new singer-guitarist in the ever versatile and more than occasionally brilliant Adrian Belew, fresh from working with Bowie, Zappa and the Talking Heads. Also bassist of choice for Peter Gabriel: Tony Levin had joined the group. So what could be called the modern King Crimson began. The band took the modern musical vernacular and made it entirely their own. Some people said that they sounded a little like the Talking Heads but no, Crimson had their own sound entirely and frankly had a greater musical virtuosity and a startling ability to come up with amazingly catchy and yet stunning original music.

The album opens with the much loved Elephant Talk, for many years Crimson’s farewell song at concerts. To be honest this is the weakest song on the whole album, even the live versions available (those not conversant with Crimson should know that Crimson have always considered themselves an average studio band but a stunning live band and with good reason) leaves me a little cold until Belew’s gorgeous distorted guitar solo that cuts the track in two arrives. In many ways this is archetypal Crimson, Fripp’s precise guitar riffs, Levin’s creative bass, Brufford’s impeccable drumming and Belew’s aforementioned guitar and yet it is somehow never quite as brilliant as it could ever be, though as a piece of music it ever escalates towards what it could have been. But of course we all have our own particular tastes and I forgive Crimson the occasional disappointment of Elephant Talk because:

Frame By Frame is just so damn good. The opening, again with Fripp again ever so precise guitar-wise and Brufford’s very eighties and yet at the time so modern electronic drumming is wonderfully tense, like Baroque music removed from its context and placed somewhere startling new. Belew’s vocals are wonderful and the album version is almost as good as the version from Absent Lovers: Crimson’s last live recording for almost a decade. Everything falls together in Frame By Frame and yet it’s hard to see quite why, it’s tense, certainly, fraught with a strange vulnerability and a delicate precision: the control and occasional Belew release is perfect. As you’ve no doubt guessed Frame By Frame is simply a favourite and one hard to explain, it’s imply a delicious track that works by virtue of magnificent musicians’ complementing one another perfectly to create something that is far more than the sum of its parts despite the fact that the parts are gorgeous regardless.

Matte Kudasai, well, beautiful, the perfect example of Adrian Belew’s skills as ballad song writer as there’s on rock-ballad pretensions or patheticness. Belew’s backwards guitar is so melancholy as to be devastating, his vocals are taut with emotion. Again there’s a delicacy but such emotion seething behind it as to defy explanation. It’s a love song certainly but somehow transcendental, it’s frankly masterful and there is not way to explain it otherwise. It drips emotion, tension and yet is truly, emotively beautiful beside and so effortlessly so, there’s no great attempt to tug heartstrings it simply is.

A song to scare your friends Indiscipline is a song of two sides; a schizophrenic piece of music, beginning with careful precision, cautious riffs and motifs, even Belew’s psychotic trademark guitar is almost measured. The vocals are slow, spoken matter-of-fact, with nothing but first percussion and then Fripp’s incrementally growing guitar until the sudden battering onslaught of music apparently chaotic but really no more than the logical, more passionate extreme of its precursor. The song juxtaposes control (discipline) with ironically controlled virtuosity (indiscipline) that masquerades as chaos. Intelligent, certainly; chaotic, actually never; eventually music by four musician’s perfectly in tune with one another, there are a plethora of sounds, of instruments and yet there’s nothing clashing about them, no sense of being in disharmony, quite the reverse and in many ways startling beautiful for it.

A classic, no other word for it, Thela Hun Ginjeet, is inspired, brilliant, delightful, magnificent, sublime, supreme: have I made my point? The amount of energy the song gives out is beyond reckoning. Belew’s vocals are barely understandable thought he tells a spoken word story of recording thoughts whilst walking through New York and being stopped by two thugs that may or may not be apocryphal but what does it matter, his point is made. Instrumentally, the interplay between Fripp and Belew’s guitars is sheer magnificence; Levin and Brufford don’t so much lend percussive support as add their own virtuosity. It is more tension: guitar riffs strangling the air; bass pulsing. Music to feel alive by, there really is no better song writing and execution than this, entirely contemporary to the 80s yet utterly modern at the same time. It’s my favourite from the whole album and a delight in every possible way, there is no exception.

The Sheltering Sky emerges from Belew’s strident guitar that ends Thela Hun Ginjeet and is a real sleeper, the kind of track that Crimson found so effortless in the early eighties and yet so rarely ever got recognition for. An instrumental the track is ground by the low undulating bass of Levin, Fripp’s controlled guitar and Brufford’s almost ambient electronic drumming. Belew’s again strident guitar almost prefigures the north-African gorgeousness of the next album’s Sartori in Tangiers. Beautiful, when Fripp allows his guitar to run it does so almost subliminally and yet strangely so prominently. It becomes Levin’s turn to add distorted synth and the effect is so beyond magnificent that I imported a whole live album just so I could get my hands on a live version of this track and for this reason I consider The Sheltering Sky as good as Thela Hun Ginjeet, because this is music that should be supremely bland, deliriously unimaginatively dull and effortlessly tedious but instead it is beautiful beyond measure, with so many interweaving rhythms and sounds as to make it an instrumental joy that goes beyond any kind of accepted genre. It is a reason to love Crimson. I lose myself in the music and there can be no greater praise.

Finally we end with Discipline, a foil to Indiscipline, it is supremely controlled and you imagine the brainchild of Fripp whilst Indiscipline is that if Belew, especially as Fripp is very much the force behind Discipline, with his sublimely controlled guitar; though you have to admit Brufford’s drumming deserves merit as he really keeps the music going. It is foil, counter-foil music: an act of musical fencing, the idea of somehow respecting your enemy, complementing them yet attempting to out do them, and Crimson does so brilliantly. There is a great controlled solidity to the music that I imagine is impossible to reproduce. It’s another case of silently tense music appearing as if out of nowhere and creeping within the listener to inspire them. A part of me thinks that Discipline should be tedious but it’s truly wonderful, it is, and I find that I lose myself in trying to follows the different rhythms. It’s understated to be sure and that’s half the point to me, it’s like a sly moment of brilliance slipped in under your nose.

Strangely for a band that considers itself poor as a studio band there is something remarkably wonderful about Discipline; though I rarely listen to it as I am drawn to live Crimson, it is still a superb album that really does sound fantastical though over twenty years old and the fact that I am only two years old than it. It’s modern and yet of it’s time and for that’s perfect, all cultural artefacts (forgive the term) bring with them a sense, an idea, of the time that they were created and Discipline certainly does this and at the same time it is effortlessly creative and thoroughly seductive. Buy now!

The re-mastered version even has an extra track, a different version of the beautiful Matte Kudasai, so you can say no?