03.08.1995

Challenging as ever

Danny Hammill reviews Thrak, Studio album by King Crimson (Discipline Global Mobile, 1995)

THRAK is the full length follow up to last year’s CD-EP Vroom, which was the first recording by King Crimson - ‘progressive’ rock maestros - in over a decade.

King Crimson were the brainchild of ‘professor’ Robert Fripp and exploded onto the rock scene in 1969 with their acknowledged classic LP, In The Court of the Crimson King. The famous opening track, ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, introduced the world to Fripp’s innovative guitar technique, which moves between scary, take-no-prisoners metallic riffs and other-worldly, ‘soundscaping’ (which predates groups like The Orb or Ozric Tentacles by decades).

Naturally, given Crimson’s long lineage, many of the (not so) young hipsters who write for music magazines love to dub them “dinosaurs”. This is rather ironic, as Fripp issued a famous statement in 1974 saying the day was over for King Crimson as it should be for all “dinosaur bands”. Fortunately they reformed again in 1981. Now they are back once more, as challenging as ever.

Thrak is a mixture of the brisk futuristic funk sound of the 1980s and the grinding instrumental-based ‘prog-rock’ of the 1970s, whose epic fusion of heavy rock, avant-garde jazz and contemporary classical (not to forget the short radio-friendly ballads) makes the grunge of groups like Pearl Jam and Nirvana seem ludicrously tame.

For me, the stand out tracks are the swanky ‘Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream’, with its crafty pastiche of Beatles-style psychedelia, and the majestic ‘Vroom Vroom: Coda’, which brings the CD to a menacing conclusion. The title track is also impressive but its aggressive dissonant drumming is not for the faint hearted.

This is not to say Thrak is the perfect CD; the content does suffer somewhat from a slight awkwardness, its contrasting musical styles never fully integrated.

In a recent interview, Fripp explained how in the 1980s the “stunning hostility” of the post-punk music press constricted the scope of the band, but thankfully: “Unlike in the early 1980s, I feel that King Crimson can draw on any Crimson music vocabulary now from any period, without apology or reservation” (Mojo, May 1995).

Also deserving of praise is Fripp’s hatred of the sharp-suited practices of the “dinosaur” mega-record companies, which brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. In this respect he has set up Discipline Global Mobile (DGM), which is run on a strict ‘ethical’ basis. Revealingly, Thrak will have to sell almost half a million copies in America (where it is being distributed by Virgin) to equal his earnings from just 12,000 copies of his solo CD Soundscapes, which is being released exclusively by DGM.

Let us hope that Bob Fripp, in his own small way, can shake up the stagnant musical universe, which has been utterly emasculated by the abonimations known as punk, heavy metal, disco, house, ragga, jungle, techno, etc, where the central determinant is not the music, but whether you look right and can strike the correct poses.

Danny Hammill