10 December : Lizard

Lizard was King Crimson’s third album, and the second released in 1970. It was a very different beast to it’s predecessors.

In May, I wrote of In The Wake of Poseidon that:

I still haven’t made my mind up about it which, after half a century, says something about it I guess. There are a lot of things to like, notably every time Keith Tippett touches a keyboard, but I don’t feel drawn to it in the way I was to Crimson King or, not long afterwards, Larks Tongues in Aspic.

 

If Crimson King rode the waves out of the sixties, Poseidon feels somehow becalmed on the cusp of the seventies, looking for a direction.

Lizard is not the direction they would ultimately take, but its a step in the right direction and is the better for it. There’s still that mellotron sound that’s practically diagnostic of the early Crims, but musically it is a major step forward. The original band members had gone and the continuity here with Poseidon is provided by Fripp and Keith Tippett.

I’ve said a number of times during this project that it is a pleasure to encounter a record that is its own thing, that can’t be located in terms of its commercial or artistic influences; you just know those records when you hear them, whether or not you like them. This is another of those albums; the only tradition this is in is that of Robert Fripp’s musical imagination. The only other band doing anything like this stuff at the time was Van der Graaf Generator.

For a long time, Fripp himself was dismissive of this album, until the process of remastering with Steven Wilson convinced him that there was merit in it after all. Some of it cropped up the last time I saw them live in late 2018 and bludgeoned us all into admiring submission. For myself, it’s one of their albums I haven’t really listened to much until the last couple of days, and I’ve been enjoying it. I like the addition of Mel Collins on flute and sax, and I like that Fripp plays a lot of acoustic guitar on it. Stylistically, there remain echoes of their previous incarnations, but there’s that curious hybrid of melodicism and spiky angularity that fans of the band’s later output know and love. The only real weak aspect is Gordon Haskell’s vocals, although Accrington Jon Anderson crops up on one track.

It’s also an interesting one for the slicers and dicers of genre conventions. This isn’t rock and it isn’t jazz and it isn’t what you might call generic ‘modern classical’, although elements of all three, and more, are present throughout. It’s back to my comment about it being its own thing; its genre is King Crimson.

This isn’t Larks Tongues in Aspic and it isn’t Red, but its an interesting piece of work all the same. I listened, several times, on Spotify and have the CD on order, though it likely won’t arrive until after Christmas given the state of the post.