King Crimson - Red

They have already put the Prog Rock genre on the English map with the release of their debut album released in 1969, But it was time for King Crimson to take a break after the release of their seventh album, Red. The Crimso were now a trio after David Cross on violin left the band to become more of a session musician while a little help from former members of the group Ian McDonald and Mel Collins on saxes to help out with them.

John Wetton, Robert Fripp, and Bill Bruford were now the prog version of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. From the heavy introduction of Robert Fripp's guitar work on the opening self-titled track, is a torturing work of guitar solos, metalish sounds of the bass, and an explosive drum work, makes the album so damn good. The melodic dreamland beauty of Fallen Angel, is almost a prog love-song, that Crimson would have wished they were a jazz rock version of the fabulous mop tops, the Beatles while the heavy sound comes back in and in a high voltage sound of the thrashing piece of One More Red Nightmare.

The last two tracks shows them in their arranging and composition format. The 8-minute live performance at the Palace Theater on Providence, makes it spot-on with a grunge fusion sound of the Mahavishnu Orchestra while the closing 12-minute piece Starless, becomes more of an epic from the sounds of an early version of King Crimson of In the Wake of Poseidon and then into a heavy metal miles davis sound and then climaxes it similar to the finale of In the Court of the Crimson King.

Sadly, Robert Fripp broke Crimson up after the release of Red. He later worked with Brian Eno on No Pussyfooting and Eno's 1st solo album, Here Come the Warm Jets to the Berlin trilogy with David Bowie. In 1981, he reformed King Crimson in a new line-up including Bill Bruford. But this time with Frank Zappa's guitarist Adrian Belew and Peter Gabriel's bassist Tony Levin and released Discipline. It had been seven years since King Crimson released an album.