LIZARD

This album has the worst vocals of all of King Crimson's lineups (except for the first movement of Lizard which features Jon Anderson), which makes this one really hard to listen to. The instrumentals, however, are brilliant, ever changing at any second going from harsh and dissonant to beautiful and melodic. The contrast at times is stunning and amazing. This one is also a lot jazzier than most of their albums and has a generous amount of brass and reed instruments mixed by crazy guitar and otherworldly mellotron. This is an album for expert level proggers and not for the general public. Once again KC proves that they are ahead of their time, taking prog to another level, the level of quasi avant-garde or even breaking into post punk/rock territory even before it was even a twinkle in anyone's mind. This one is way out there and it would take a long time for the music industry to embrace it. Even for a die hard KC fan, it's hard to rate this above 4 stars because of the vocals, but the instrumentals make up for it in a big way. With 4 medium to short songs and 1 gigantic suite over 20 minutes long, this is definitely an interesting album.