Discipline - King Crimson (1981)

A week of kings: I spun up my randomizer and randomly got 3 different artists with “King” in their names. So I’ve expanded it to a whole week

This is another record I never get tired of talking about. I love King Crimson, and the version of the band that first made me love them was one of the iterations featuring the guitar wizardry and canny songcraft of Adrian Belew. Not everyone who likes Crim likes Belew, but mastermind Robert Fripp needs to have a foil, someone to tell him no, and I think the more excessive versions of Crimson (like, say, the ones with three drummers) are because of Fripp’s tendency to the grandiose.

Belew’s talent is not only for writing great and memorable tunes, but also his personality and place in the band force Fripp to be a little more song-oriented, a little less let’s-have-twelve-interlocking-arpeggios-for-13-minutes.

Whether you credit Belew with it or not, this album is one of the most striking turnarounds in rock history. Crimson had been very successful in the 70s, but the music world was changing rapidly at the turn of the 80s. Fripp recognized that the old strategies might not work, and stripped down the band and re-tooled them into a lean, tense, jagged chunk of ultra-modern rock that was still progressive in every way but didn’t sound much like anything the other prog giants were doing.

The spare and skeletal structure of the sound wouldn’t have been possible if not for the combination of the four musicians that ended up performing it. Belew and Fripp are both fierce and exacting guitarists, able to play off each other and jet in and out between lead and support. Tony Levin (a personal musical obsession of mine) plays the Chapman Stick, and his talent on the instrument enables him to be both a bassist and a third melodic voice, sometimes both. Former Yes and Genesis drummer Bill Bruford has been a master of his instrument and a master of the complex rock vocabulary the band was playing in.

This version of the band only lasted a few years, although they did record two more high-quality studio albums of this modern-prog sound, along with a lot of live material.