STARLESS AND BIBLE BLACK

Faithful to the compulsion to experiment and improvise as fundamental energy sources to develop their works, King Crimson take a step further with the complex "Starless and Black Bible", their sixth album (although to call it complex in the case of Robert Fripp's band is like saying the most common thing). Studio recordings and live improvisations, isolated from the sound of the audience, force the listener to a new exercise of concentration and maximum attention in order to enter the schizoid Crimsonian universe.

Difficult to digest tracks like the disconcerting "We'll Let You Know", the chaotic order of "The Mincer", or the intemperate "Starless and Bible Black" and Fripp's screeching and persistent guitars, contrast with Wetton's peaceful and grave voice in the precious "The Night Watch", a title taken from one of the works of the Dutch painter Rembrandt, with the relaxed and instrumentally magical "Trio" and David Cross's violins overlapping with Fripp's guitars, and also with the excellent and extended instrumental dalliance "Fracture", dominated almost from beginning to end by Fripp's errant and distorted guitars again, in a constant half-time with jazzy airs and reinforced by Bruford's drums. One of the album's best.

A hypnotic cocktail full of chiaroscuro sensations, from which only the agile and catchy critique of consumerism "The Great Deceiver" and the nostalgic and at the same time unleashed "Lament" are spared. Curiously, both songs, with more conventional structures, are the only ones on the album recorded in the studio.

"Starless and Bible Black" is one of the few King Crimson albums in which the same musicians from their previous work, "Lark's Tongues in Aspic", were kept on, and it was also the ideal transition to the indispensable "Red".

Very good.

3.5/4 stars