What the hell did I just listen to? ...so much musical excess!
The opening (title) track is a journey from tinkling finger cymbals through various musical movements including some fantastic bass work. Bass seems to be a featured instrument in many of the prog-rock albums I've listened to so far on the list.
This first track gives way to more mellow songs. There's the delicate and beautiful "Book of Saturday", with it's graceful violin and backwards guitar duet; the proggy ballad of 'Exiles'; the rock riffs of 'Easy Money'; and again the proggy excesses of 'The Talking Drum' and the second part of the title track.
Brilliant album.
It's a shame they don't have room for more Crimson albums - the other two with Wetton and Bruford in the lineup are both very good, and 1981's Discipline, with Adrian Belew, is a great effort at updating their sound for new wave influences.
ReplyDeleteThe list is often a bit lopsided. I find that some bands get an inordinate number of their albums included, even if there's not a lot of variety between them, while more diverse artists (John Zorn and Mike Patton spring to mind) get one album each.
DeleteWith Crimson, yes even lower ranked albums like "Red" have plenty to recommend them.
Red is currently in the all-time top 40 in RateYourMusic.com, so it's hardly lower ranked - just not on the 1001 list. I like most of the list fine, but it's certainly not huge on progressive rock. Its weakest point of the 2005 edition is a whole pile of forgotten albums from the 1995-2005 era - does anyone care about The Coral now?
DeleteThat is the good thing about the constant iterations of the book though, that it allows for a few of the newer entries to get a touch more 'time-tested' and to see if their influence spreads or fades with time. The same way people often say "oh the 60s was a great decade for music". It was... but at the same time, a lot of the 'chaff' from that decade has fallen by the wayside through the years.
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