The third CD is a notoriously famous concert recording from Pittsburgh, featuring a discoomfited Fripp battling food poisoning and thereby letting the other band members take a bit more prominence.
Fripp is enough of a professional not to let his parts sag, and the best indication of Fripp's increasing desire to get the hell off stage and to a bathroom comes in the encore, featuring a very short, stinging Larks' Tongue II that lashes the audience with less than 3 minutes of fiery guitars followed by a hasty exit to the amazement of the audience. This set features one of the few recordings of the song Doctor Diamond a piece never quite settled on by the band. A personal favorite, the violin-led improv Daniel Dust, is the centerpiece of this selection. Another powerful improv from Penn State rounds out the CD. The fourth CD is many fans' favorite. The improvs The Golden Walnut and The Law of Maximum Distress , are two of the most powerful and fascinating improvisations in the set, the second one marred by a jarring cut in the middle when the engineer's tape ran out, leaving the listener wondering how the band got from its double-mellotron noodling in Part I to the tight, savage thundering of Part II. This CD's version of Larks' Tongues I is particularly satisfying. Some songs are presented more than once (we get FOUR versions of Easy Money, mostly because the song was usually used as a lead-in for an improv), which for the casual fan might come across as lazy redundancy, but for the dedicated KC listener gives a chance to hear the seemingly endless variations on a particular song that the band would explore on various nights. A casual fan won't want to spend the bucks for this set until they flesh out their collection with the three absolutely essential studio releases from 72-74 and perhaps explore the guitar gamelan, to steal a phrase, of the later 80s, the six-man Dinosaur 90s, and the stripped-down post-millenium iterations of the band. But if you're a dedicated KC fan, and you have a particular fondness for the early 70s lineup, you need this set. Music to invade Mordor by. 85/100
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Robert Fripp: Guitar, mellotron, electric piano Year: 2007 |