RED

The instrumentation on this album is superb, Bill Bruford puts in one of the best performances of his illustrious career on this album with some very interesting heavy, technical and jazzy drumming, Fripp is up to his old tricks with his distinctive guitar technique and John Wetton on bass holds it all together with some fat grooves.

Red is a fantastic opening track, very heavy, excellent riffs and the band just gels together really well easily one of the best tracks on the album. Fallen angel is quite a mellow song, fairly poppy, not bad although nothing really worth writing home about. The band then ventures once again into heavy territory with the appropriately named One more red nightmare and it is easily the best song on the album, Bruford is in blistering form, there are some excellent riffs going on here and some great severely flanged clap sounds before it all descends into a slow groovy jam with some weird and wonderful wah action from Fripp, the highlight of the album.

As i mentioned earlier this album has some major flaws, the main one being the song providence, nothing much goes on here, nothing at all really it's a waste of 8 or so minutes, this is one thing I really dislike about King Crimson, these long avant-garde songs (like moonchild on ITCOTCK) where nothing really happens, it just seems a waste of time, 5 minutes worth of Providence is practically silence and then it eventuates in nothing but a mindless disjointed mess at the end where everyone pretty much does what they like.

The album is the finished off with starless which starts off as a melancholy song with that famous mellotron sound in the intro, it's very reminiscent of earlier works I quite like the main song part of Starless which goes for around 4 minutes before another 4 minutes of building before the song launches into a high speed jazz groove to finish the album in spectacular style, a very well written song.

Overall this a good album it has some fantastic songs and is well worth listening to for any prog fan, it's just there are a few weak points that hold it back and one or 2 songs that you might want to skip.

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