Starless

By all accounts, the somewhat unexpected 2014 King Crimson tour was a resounding success and Live at the Orpheum is the first offering for those who were unable to attend. The band had been reinvented with a combination of new and returning players and the set list consisted largely of tunes that hadn't been performed live since the '70s, if at all. The main wild card was the three-drummer front line, which easily could have turned into a mess, even without music as challenging as Crimson's. Well, the time the three drummers (Pat Mastelotto, Bill Rieflin, and Gavin Harrison) spent rehearsing before convening the entire group was well worth it, because they play with a single mind throughout. The returning Mel Collins sounds fantastic on all manner of saxophones and flute, and hearing Tony Levin's amazing bass playing on all these old King Crimson tunes is a real treat…

“Yeaaah” yells Bill Bruford as the band tear into The Great Deceiver filling the cavernous-sounding venue with all of their considerable might and firepower. He yells some more as they bulldoze their way from that track into a devastatingly heavy Doctor Diamond.

The CD features the original album, plus three extra tracks (stunning pre-overdub trio versions of Red & Fallen Angel and the full version of Providence).
King Crimson fell apart once more, seemingly for the last time, as David Cross walked away during the making of this album. It became Robert Fripp's last thoughts on this version of the band, a bit noiser overall but with some surprising sounds featured, mostly out of the group's past - Mel Collins' and Ian McDonald's saxes, Marc Charig's cornet, and Robin Miller's oboe, thus providing a glimpse of what the 1972-era King Crimson might've sounded like handling the later group's repertory (which nearly happened). Indeed, Charig's cornet gets just about the best showcase it ever had on a King Crimson album, and the truth is that few intact groups could have gotten an album as good as Red together…

King Crimson performed Heroes at the Admiralspalast in Berlin as a celebration, a remembrancing and an homage. The concert was thirty-nine years and one month after the original sessions at the Hansa Tonstudio overlooking the Berlin Wall. This is released in the Fortieth Anniversary year.
The title track sees Robert Fripp reprise the unforgettable guitar role he created for the original David Bowie studio recording in the same city in 1977, particularly poignant in the year of Bowie's death.
Also featured on the EP are a ten minutes recording of Easy Money (Paris), a song that varies in length and solos from night to night and is always a fan favourite, an edited version (featuring the “song section”) of Crim Classic Starless often a set closer, always a stand-out moment and a recording of the three drummers’ showpiece The Hell Hounds of Krim…

As Robert Fripp had done with King Crimson's first live LP, Earthbound (1972), USA is a single-disc concert package documenting the quartet during its 1974 swing through North America. As with its predecessor, USA was also issued as a sonic cenotaph of the concurrently defunct Krim. So insistent that the band would not be resurrected, Fripp concluded the LP's liner notes at the time with another three-letter epitaph: "R.I.P." The 1973/1974 King Crimson included the collective efforts of Fripp (guitar/Mellotron), David Cross (violin), John Wetton (bass/vocals), and Bill Bruford (drums/percussion).

In the mid 1960’s, Detroit Michigan was a thriving industrial city. It was at the edge of a cliff, however. The great ethnic diversity in the inner city was a brewing powder keg of civil unrest. This, coupled with a disillusioned population struggling to make some sense of a questionable war in the rice paddies of Viet Nam, set an uneasy and troubling tempo for the future. Still, there were pockets of communities in the Detroit area where things were good and economic life was vibrant. The Grosse Pointes were such communities. It was on the outskirts of this political and racially tense era, in the affluent suburbs just outside of the city of Detroit, that Index was formed. The music of Index has been lauded by music heads for decades, and with good reason: it is bizarre, atmospheric, and “home-made” (in the best of all possible ways); the band has a druggie sound, with songs full of feedback and fuzzy guitars…

Although John Wetton is at the helm throughout all of these tracks, King's Road, 1972-1980 is really a collaboration of progressive rock artists that have joined Wetton across each of the 13 songs. Wetton's renditions of songs by his former bands King Crimson and UK come off quite clean and refined, especially "As Long As You Want Me Here" from 1979's Night After Night Live album and the opening "Nothing to Lose" off Danger Money. While his efforts at singing the King Crimson tracks lack the magic and fullness they exhibit in their original form, they still maintain a slight electrified feel. The entire 12 minutes of "Starless" from the classic Red album makes for an excellent finishing track, brought marvelously back to life with the steady drumming of Bill Bruford and the sparkling keyboard work of Robert Fripp…