King Crimson
Larks' Tongues In Aspic

THE REVIEW

In 1972, Fripp experienced an intellectual crisis that led him to dismantle and recreate the band that represented his very own thoughts and way of creating music, King Crimson. For the new Crimson project, he enlisted rock bassist/singer John Wetton, Yes drummer Bill Bruford, violinist David Cross, and the genius madman percussionist Jamie Muir from the Music Improvisation Company. What followed was a stylistic shift from epic and classical sounds, which had become such a significant cliché that they brought along a host of bands that led to talk of a genuine genre (what would be called Symphonic Rock), to harsh purely jazz-rock sounds, akin to that electric wave born from Miles and developed through various Weather Report and (especially) Mahavishnu Orchestra, coexisting with Bartok's contrapuntal techniques and the experimentations of classical avant-garde in its entirety (Steve Reich above all) with exotic references and free jazz improvisations like Derek Bailey (in fact, percussionist Jamie Muir was his associate in his Music Improvisation Company).

This stylistic shift was parallel to a deeper “philosophical” change: from the old texts characterized by chivalrous tales suitable for the hippy philosophy of “with a smile we can save the world”, to more concrete texts with equally universal meaning, as a consequence of greater awareness compared to the past and the understanding that the fairy tales of the “flower children” have turned into nothing but useless chimeras in the service of a fashion capable not only of fostering apathy and inertia from a political standpoint but also of flattening and mutilating musical offerings that do not adhere to the canons shared by the movement. But the strength of the record lies in the fact that the revolution is not always shouted or blatant like that of the various Zappa, nor the backbone of the record, but finely hidden, thus managing not to renounce expressing clichés already in use by the old King Crimson.

The album starts with “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic pt. I” the most beautiful piece in Crimson history, in my view the most beautiful in the history of music: in a track lasting 13 minutes, the revolutionized Crimson formation manages to summarize styles and trends from 70 years earlier, blending them with the most avant-garde innovations of the period: the Reichian experimentations of the initial percussive phasing serve as an introduction to Fripp's sharp guitar and Wetton's distorted bass Hard Rock riff, in which the emotional tension builds until it explodes. A sense of anguish is more than ever suggested by Cross's violin. The percussion stuns us, serving as an element of disturbance. There seems to be no possible resolution... until an arpeggio by Fripp completely breaks the tension, projecting us into the most typical jazz-rock sounds, where the Muir-Bruford rhythmic duo delivers the greatest percussive performance ever recorded: Bruford's refinement and unconventionality provide the perfect backdrop to Muir's free jazz experimentation, allowing one to drag and overwhelm us while the other astonishes with color and shades never before heard... they thus become the true protagonists, who, without being overwhelming, do not overshadow the phrasings of the other instrumentalists. And just when you think there is no continuity solution for this emotional explosion, the group stops, leaving us with a sense of incompleteness that the subsequent long violin improvisation will maintain until the delicate finale where Fripp, with his placid arpeggios, enchanting, hypnotic incomprehensible whispers, and a delicate bell, will soothe the now tired mind, finally closing one of the highest pieces in music history.

More explicit is the exotic “Easy Money,” whose innovative strength is at its peak during Fripp's solo, which shares the solo part while dominating with Jamie Muir’s acrobatic percussion and Bill Bruford’s captivating drumming background. And it is with this spirit that one tackles melancholic ballads like “Book of Saturday,” a splendid gem lasting 3 minutes in which Fripp's arpeggios demonstrate how the cliché about his allegedly grumpy personality is unfounded, or the long “Exiles,” in which the band's lyricism is highlighted, leaving the lion's share to Robert Fripp, who delivers a long but simple, spine-tingling solo. They are pure demonstrations of how apparent simplicity, great evocative power, catchiness, and concreteness of the lyrics can coexist with great revolutionary power. The penultimate track “The Talking Drum” is an exotic and hypnotic musical crescendo in which Fripp and Cross dominate the scene against the backdrop of Wetton's obsessive bass and the colorful rhythmic section. The natural resolution to the driving force of the piece is the devastating and innovative “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic pt. II,” an instrumental piece written solely by Fripp with strongly Hard Rock sounds, which will later be revisited in future Crimson formations for its relevance and symbolic power.

In my opinion, one of the most beautiful albums in history is still underestimated and regarded simply as a “beautiful album” due to the mildness of its revolution, which instead should be the reason to love it.