BEAT

Less than a year after the very good "Discipline", the first album by the eighties reincarnation of King Crimson, the band led by the brilliant Robert Fripp released "Beat" (1982), the second album of their trilogy of that decade and their ninth in general. A work that maintains the style of its predecessor, marked by new wave tendencies, seen as always from the band's non-negotiable experimental style and whose subject matter is referenced to the Beat Generation of cultural relevance mainly in the fifties and sixties.

From the lively harmony of "Neal and Jack and Me" (a tribute to beat writers Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac) which Adrian Belew masterfully guides with that particular voice that doesn't seem to take things too seriously, "Beat" is sustained by a technically very neat style in short mileage developments and which gives way to surprisingly digestible tracks like the poppy "Heartbeat", and relaxed atmospheres as in the instrumental and arabesque "Sartori in Tangier" or in the lysergic modernity of "Waiting Man" with Belew's plaintive singing accompanied by Bill Bruford's Africanised percussion or in the sensual beauty of "Two Hands".

But also, as befits a self-respecting Crimsonian album, experimentation has a special place in "Beat", with the unhinged nocturnal city description in "Neurotica" and the introductory intervention of Fripp's Frippertronics, or the strange and wooded "The Howler" which seems to take new wave and remake it in the manner of King Crimson with some moments in which Tony Levin takes the lead (and sanity.... ) with his bass, or finally in the concluding "Requiem", which after Fripp at the controls again on the Frippertronics stars in a very good first half, ends in a jam session in which the musicians seem to go their own individual way.

Although "Beat" is a bit in the shadow of "Discipline", it does show the band positioned according to what Fripp's tangled mind imagined: the least expected place.

Good

3/3.5 stars