Wow! What an album. This is the root of all progressive rock out there: Crimson King are by many considered the founding band for the entire genre. And this album contains anything you might recognize in many other rock bands. I hear Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin in the opening track, Genesis comes to mind when listening to the title track. Epipath just makes me want to grab those Pink Floyd cd’s. Mirrors, the instrumental part of the opening track, will make any Yes fan go “hell yeah!”.

King Crimson In The Court of the Crimson King Cover

21st Century Schizoid Man is beautifull, chaotic and funky all mixed together in 7 minutes of mostly instrumental music. The vocal parts are great and makes you sing along, and the instrumental solo in the mid-section (name Mirrors) builds up to a great climax. This song is probably the best composed song on this album though not my favourite. Sometimes I feel that they overdid the chaos-element and that it’s just plain noises.

The fluit that opens I Talk to the Wind pulls you back to reality. This song is a beautiful love balad, very peaceful and with a great keyboard solo.

In my opinion, the best part of the album is Epitaph, I’m a big Pink Floyd fan and this song reminds me so much of their music. It’s just so good. The vocals are obviously the best on the entire album, the instruments are perfect and allow the vocalist to do his job. This also reminds me a bit of Kansas, the vocal parts for sure. It’s just hard to describe how much I rapture this song!

The next song Moonchild actually begins pretty good, with it’s 12:13 it’s the longest track on the album, but sadly only the first 2 minutes are good. After the vocal section is over there’s a lot of ummagumma-like experimentation with the keyboard which doesn’t seem to stop. It’s a great song to fall asleep with but that’s all…

The killer title track is a great finale for so great an album. The melody and the chorus make this a great progressive rock song!

Tags: King Crimson, progressive

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 11:10 and is filed under Album Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “In the Court of the Crimson King”

1. Clayton Says:
   November 19th, 2009 at 05:40

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   December 11th, 2009 at 10:14

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   December 13th, 2009 at 13:33

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