THE ESSENTIAL KING CRIMSON: FRAME BY FRAME

The first CD of four has their 1969-1971 material on it, and their legendary first recording has been transferred here quite nicely, having all of its material except the ten minutes sound wall of the "Moonchild" track. The next albums are presented quite shortly, and sadly there's much of material I personally found interesting missing.

Disc two presents in my opinion their most interesting line-up with John Wetton and David Cross. The sound of re-mastered music is beautiful, and there's a good selection of songs here, but sadly "Larks' Tongues in Aspic part one", "Fracture" and "Starless" have been "abridged", which means they have been edited to shorter versions. This is truly a shame, I think it would have been better solution to select fewer tracks than giving several torsos for the display.

Third disc has material from their Tony Levin and Adrian Belew era albums from the early 1980's, and this CD works most dynamically from all of these four CDs. The essential tracks are present unedited, and there's a nice "barber shop" song as a bonus feature at the end of the disc.

The fourth CD has the live material on it. "Get Thy Bearings" is a nice cover song from Donovan, and their version of Holst's "Mars" is interesting and legendary act, but maybe bit boring. "The Talking Drum" is a bit weird selection, as it is usually used as a lead to "Larks' Tongues in Aspic part two" which is not there, but there's a version of "21st Century Schizoid Man" behind it. I'm not very satisfied with Robert's trend of altering his past works, but this opinion of course seen from a vantage point of his music's adorer. The conversation about artist's rights on own work versus audiences demand continues on some forums without resolution. Luckily there's "Asbury Park", which should interest the fans of the 1972-1974 line-up, as it is their full-improvised jam from the stage. The 1980's song choices are also fine, especially the version of "Indiscipline" here is awesome. There's also a small but funny misspelling in the album track times considering this disc, as "The Talking Drum" is marked to last nearly thirty minutes.

There's also a very neat booklet included in the box, which has old paper articles about the band, an essay by Fripp, their gig lists and neat pictures which are animated when you flip the papers. If you are not familiar with the material of King Crimson 1969-1984 albums, this could be a decent introduction to them if you can lend this or get it with a moderate price. Maybe this isn't as "essential" in quality as its title suggests, but a better one in the family of the compilations of this band.

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