King Crimson: Beat : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

With his professorial demeanor and incessant theorizing, Robert Fripp has always seemed like the Mr. Spock of rock and, as such, has tended to lean away from the emotional content of his music – which is why his albums have sounded congenitally labored and strangely impassive. But Beat changes all that; on this record, Fripp and King Crimson are evolving a new group concept that is progressive in every sense of the word.

Inside the Beat might be an even better title. Drummer Bill Bruford and bassist Tony Levin employ accents and syncopations that circle the beat without resorting to boom-chick lockstep, while Fripp and guitar foil Adrian Belew achieve a perfect rotary motion that suggests unison while moving in contrapuntal opposition. The opening number, "Neal and Jack and Me," takes a typical garden-variety cruisin' groove and transforms it into a kind of Gregorian surf music. The album's epilogue, "Requiem," finds Crimson dispensing with time completely as Bruford rolls and tumbles furiously while Belew plays Pharaoh Sanders to Fripp's John Coltrane in a white-hot contrast of colors and melody.

In between, Crimson creates a new kind of electronic string music that achieves an orchestral density without resorting to ersatz art-rock bombast. Fripp's fluttering guitar-synthesizer work on "Satori in Tangier" is particularly evocative of a bowed violin, while Belew elicits a sitarlike drone from his Stratocaster over Bruford's tabla-style groove on "Two Hands."

King Crimson may never rope in a pop audience like the Police or Asia have, but they stand a good chance of attracting a following of disaffected listeners who want more from rock than a party.