Top 100 Albums of the 1970s - #72 - King Crimson - Red (1974)

It probably says a lot about King Crimson frontman Robert Fripp's sense of humor that the cover of an album called Red is almost entirely black and white. Or maybe it's just a stark and somber image of a band falling apart, as King Crimson almost always was. For their last album of the 1970s, the group had been reduced to the power trio of John Wetton on bass and vocals, Bill Bruford on drums, and Robert Fripp on guitar, helped along in a few places by former bandmates Ian McDonald, Mel Collins, and David Cross.

The album consists of just five tracks, but boy do they pack a punch. All of the experiments of the previous two albums come to fruition here in perfect concert. It's simultaneously a shame and fitting that the group disbanded after an achievement like Red.

The title track, which opens the album, is a dense, heavily overdubbed slab of instrumental proto-metal, built on riffs in odd time signatures and still sounding ahead of its time more than forty years later. It's hard to imagine any progressive metal or math rock band not devouring and internalizing this track.

The second song, Fallen Angel, is a lyrical ballad reminiscent of the band's debut album. Still, never content with simplicity, the track is spiced up by virtuosic drumming, the creative use of guitar harmonics, squalling sax solos, and the rarely heard Oboe setting on Mellotron, the most characteristic of all progressive rock instruments.

One More Red Nightmare develops themes from the title track into a somewhat more traditional song, although retaining the weird overtones of the original. I don't know what Bill Bruford is using as a drum kit here, but it sounds like he went out back behind the studio and found some trash cans to bang on. Maybe there are some flanged handclaps in there too? Whatever the case, it lends the whole song a very unique feel.

Providence is another instrumental, an eight-minute live track that, like the previous album, showcases the band's improvisational skills. This leads into the monumental Starless, a track that was mysteriously rejected from the previous album, but which combines emotion and virtuosity into the most thrilling twelve minutes in all of progressive rock. It's a hell of a way to close this chapter in the band's history.

I was never keen on 80s King Crimson, when New Wave and post-punk had eclipsed the classic sound of Prog Rock, so for me this album always represented the end of King Crimson as I knew them. While it's still not my favorite in their catalogue, it's hard to deny that the band ever sounded any better and more together than they do here. Truly a wonderful record that stands out, even for such a consistently creative and talented band.