STARLESS AND BIBLE BLACK

LARKS' TONGUES IN ASPIC was a fine debut album for the brilliant '73-'74-era Crimson, but, as any fan of live KC from this period will attest, it needed live performance to really inject life into that album's music. STARLESS AND BIBLE BLACK , however, is a great improvement; much earthier, starker and ballsier than its predecessor, it's a truly dark, eerie masterpiece that unnerved me totally on early listenings. There's a hell of a lot of amazing stuff on SABB; THE GREAT DECEIVER rocks, despite ultra-surreal lyrics; LAMENT starts slowly but soon morphs into an audacious slice of hard-rock blitz; THE NIGHT WATCH is totally English, totally Crimson; TRIO is simply beautiful; THE MINCER is scary and funky (Bruford, needless to say, is brilliant throughout). But it's Side Two's duo of "improvs" that really elevate this album to greatness. STARLESS AND BIBLE BLACK is horror-movie stuff put to music, a tour-de-force of group performance - Fripp's guitar is weirder than it has ever been up to that point in KC's recorded history; and FRACTURE is almost as spooky, with a magnificently cathartic finale that ends the album much more successfully than the rather limp LARKS' TONGUES PT 2 did on the previous LP. Wetton, Bruford, Fripp and (the tragically-undervalued) Cross make a tremendous team on this landmark album, and it's an essential part of the Crims' canon. No future studio album they made would better it.