King Crimson
Red

Defined by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana as "the most beautiful album of all time", "Red", released in 1974, is the last album of one of the incarnations of the English group King Crimson, before the subsequent 1981 lineup with Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, alongside Robert Fripp and Bill Bruford, who were already present on this record.

Historical lineup of the English Progressive Pop-Rock since its debut in 1969, the group led by its absolute and charismatic leader Robert Fripp, has always distinguished and set itself apart from its peers of that era, due to a pursuit of a language that borrowed stylistic elements from cold jazz or even free-jazz, mixing them with classically-tinged harmonies and symphonic styles found in composers such as Sibelius, Stravinsky, Mahler, and others.

In the album "Red" all this reaches its apotheosis in the track that closes the album "Starless", where the languid and poignant introduction of the Mellotron and lead guitar does not foreshadow to anyone what will happen soon in the development of the track. After the exposition of the theme, simply marvelous in its apparent simplicity, the piece pauses to start again from a single note of electric guitar that, playing in an obviously odd time, slowly but progressively clashes with other notes also on guitar in a dissonant crescendo worthy of the best free tradition, until the whole group reunites in a dizzying 13/8 with the only possible conclusion: the reprise of the initial theme entrusted this time to Mel Collins' sax while John Wetton's Fender Precision bass manages to mark the tonics of the melody like a pneumatic hammer of Doomsday. A goosebumps finale as high as a skyscraper, marking the end of an era six years in advance, the 70s, and announcing with prophetic unease the decades that would come, with all their load of madness and gloom reaching to our days.

Robert Fripp, an absolute genius of English music for over three decades, alongside figures like Roger Waters, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, Peter Hammill, David Bowie, and a few others, gives us the album "summa" of all the group's previous works, with echoes of "21st Century Schizoid Man" and "In the Court of the Crimson King", throwing the doors wide open to punk music that the next year would explode in England, but with a see you in the next chapter of the group, the one of 1981 with Belew and Levin, this time with tones of cocaine-induced and hallucinated, with the announcement between the lines of the lyrics, of a collective delirium that would bring us all to an appointment with destiny perhaps at the World Trade Center. But that is another story.

Franco De Biase