bso (06/19/82)
King Crimson/Beat (Warner Bros. 23692-1)
Adrian Belew/Lone Rhino (Island IL 9751)
Hey kids! Its time to don your dancing shoes and thinking caps!
King Crimson is at it again. The second of the Neo-Crimso albums
is called "Beat," and its got a blue cover, and its got the same
people on it as the first, and maybe its even better. I haven't
yet given it the mandatory eight thousand listenings. Well, hold
on, this one has a lyric sheet, well, that's a few hundred less for
not having to figure out what Adrian Belew is saying. Oh, and take
off a couple hundred more; after seeing them on Fridays you won't
need as much time to determine who's doing what and how. Call it
seventy-five hundred. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm still
working on "Discipline."
It should come as no surprise that this new record is much like the
first; these guys are still experimenting with this new music they've
got. These things take time (it took the Who years to come up with
something interesting). It also, quite seriously, takes most people
time to get used to this stuff, but if you've got the will, you'll
discover music, to paraphrase Belew from the song "Neurotica,"
"you're unlikely to [hear] anywhere else on the planet."
At the very least, there is guitar work by Robert Fripp that is
quite possibly extra-terrestrial in origin.
More down-to-earth is "Lone Rhino," the recent solo release by Crimsonite
Adrian Belew, although this man does not approach the guitar normally
either. Belew is given to producing wild animal noises (his
"elephantosity" on "Discipline," and a rhino-in-your-living-room,
courtesy of this solo effort) and other fedback-flange effects. On
"Lone Rhino," these oddities are taken out of the complex Crimson
environment, and placed in mostly normal, well-spirited tunes,
helped along by Belew's witty lyrics ("The thrill of victory, the
agony of my feet/Adidas in heat...").
Particularly interesting is the album's last cut, "The Final Rhino,"
which is annotated with this comment: "...one night in the Bahamas,
while my amazed foot held down the sustain pedal, Audie Belew (age 4)
played this very adult piano piece which I fell in love with...later I
added the guitar, effectively producing our first father/daughter duet..."
Such are things that I would like to believe are real.
Bert Olsson
mhtsa!bso