King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King

(23 Jun 2011)

Here's something I noticed. The more I listen to music, the more I wonder what everyone sees in The Velvet Underground & Nico that is so good. I'm not denying that it is a good album, but am I missing out on something important in the album for it to be treated like it had invented music or something? To me it sounds really dated and silly, a mush of close-to-genius and embarrassingly bad. Can music have evolved so much in two years for In The Court Of The Crimson King to still hold all of its charm and magic today while nowadays The Velvet Underground & Nico holds all of the charm and magic of a particularly beautiful screwdriver?

From the first bang of raw 1969 production on "21st Century Schizoid Man" to the final weirdness in "The Court Of The Crimson King" the album manages to maintain something that The Velvet Underground's debut greatly lacked, and that is consistency. You can tell these guys know what they're doing, and that they've put some work into making this as good as it can get. Everything from the simple yet dynamic structures, to the individual instruments, to the interplay between them sound like they were crafted to squeeze as much awesomeness as they could into each song. And even from an empty sounding production, they somehow managed to squeeze a strange, stringy atmosphere, and they somehow managed to make some parts of the album sound definitely epic. And the parts of the songs, the soundscapes, the layers, the way they managed to make simple acoustic guitar riffs magnificent, the way the vocals take at the same time the role of foreground and background. It all makes for a great listening experience and an increasingly large wall of text.

So, in short, within its own and its time's boundaries, "In The Court of The Crimson King" can be considered perfect. I can end this review at that. Bye now!


Oh, wait! I forgot the standout tracks.

Standout tracks:

21st Century Schizoid Man
I Talk to the Wind
The Court of the Crimson King


There. Bye now!











*grunt* You know what the problem with this album is? It's that it's easy on you. You listen to it once and by the end of the album you've already got quite a clear idea of how every song goes. It's just all too pleasant and easy to listen to. There's no need to "dismantle" or "understand" the songs. It's all there. The only thing that makes this concoction hold any sort of mystique to it is the dirty production. There are moments of musical brilliance, the album's made of moments of musical brilliance, but it's just stuck in this cage of a Rock Sound. In that aspect, I wish this album were more like The Velvet Underground & Nico. It just sounds too professional. I wish it could be more youthful, more daring, more insecure. It just lacks a bit of personality. Everything else is perfect, I just don't feel like listening to it all that often.