RADICAL ACTION TO UNSEAT THE HOLD OF MONKEY MIND

King Crimson's most recent - and possible final - burst of activity has seen the group abandon studio activity more or less entirely, opting instead to work their craft live in shows integrating sounds from all phases of the band's long existence - and a few new compositions here and there that show influence from even newer sounds than that.

There's points here where Steven Wilson's proggier solo work, such as the Grace For Drowning album, seems to have rubbed off on Robert Fripp and pals a bit, which is perhaps no surprise given how many King Crimson members showed up on that album and how closely Steven Wilson and Fripp have been working together over the past few years to produce lovingly remastered and mixed reissues of Crimson classics.

That process also seems to have seen Fripp rediscover his love of some of the more overlooked eras of the band. In particular, Fripp has tended to pass over the run of albums beginning with In the Wake of Poseidon and ending with Islands when putting together later Crimson setlists - hailing as they do from an unhappy and difficult time in the band's existence when Fripp was flailing around somewhat to keep the project going in the midst of serious lineup instability. With fans and critics alike often giving those albums short shrift too, there wasn't any great expectation that this stuff would be revisited.

However, Fripp found a new appreciation for those albums when working on the new versions with Wilson, and the mid-2010s revival of King Crimson saw material from the era welcomed back into the repertoire, along with the return of Mel Collins, whose sensitive saxophone tones represented some of the best contributions to that era of the group and also spruces up the rest of the material to boot.

Jakko Jakszyk is the new lead vocalist and co-guitarist, slotting into the Adrian Belew role with a vocal style which is somewhat more smooth and less eccentric than Belew's - and so lends itself well to material ranging from across the portfolio. (One can't quite imagine Belew singing, say, Peace with the sincerity that Jakko manages here.)

Everything sounds fantastic - even The ConstruKction of Light, from one of the most unloved Crimson studio albums, gets a fabulous airing here, and you get an absolute treasury of material, ranging from avant-prog and borderline-metallic experimentation to lush symphonic workouts (drawing heavily on Red and In the Court of the Crimson King) to a deep dive into what had hitherto been forbidden zones of the Crimson Kingdom. On the technical level, audience noise is more or less eliminated, yielding not an album which is "live in the studio" but a live album with the crispness of a studio album.

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