LIZARD

I'd like to reiterate that no matter how historically important an album is, it does not mean it's good, enjoyable or anything that so many people on here have for some reason convinced themselves goes along with importance. King Crimson's Lizard is yet another case in point from the band. While again pushing the boundaries of rock music, the album is terribly dissonant, aimless or tuneless half of the time, not to mention that vocalist Gordon Haskell is quite a poor one. The other half of the time, however, King Crimson strikes confounding brilliance. Of the average length tracks, "Cirkus" and "Lady of the Dancing Water" are top-notch, the first with some effective dissonance, a great saxophone solo and a good vocal line (even if it's sung poorly) and the second is a beautiful ballad where the vocals actually sound good. "Indoor Games" and "Happy Family" are pretty weak. There are some good ideas strewn about, but the arrangement is just chaotic and a lot of the embellishments do nothing to help the songs. The 23-minute epic title track is hard to explain. Harder than the other tracks, which I more or less didn't bother trying to describe as it is. Starting off nicely with guest vocals from Jon Anderson (before Yes was worth your time), the song then moves off into a mostly instrumental jam fest. It's a pretty sturcutred jam, but one does get the feeling that it isn't totally a coherent epic. Certainly it's filled with a lot of good material, but by the end it just doesn't seem like anything was accomplished. The ending movement is especially disconcerting. The song actually built into a climactic seemed-to-be ending and then just goes into some random final movement that seems rather unecessary.

I listen to my fair share of challenging music, and while this makes for a good starting point, obviously far beyond its time, other bands have tried similar things to greater sucess down the road.