King Crimson: Discipline [Caroline Bonus Track] : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Having completed his "drive to 1981" with both a "Frippertronics" LP, Let the Power Fall, and a "Discotronics" disc, The League of Gentlemen, Robert Fripp has launched a new three-year plan he calls the "incline to 1984." "The next step is discipline," he concluded on Let the Power Fall, and, fittingly, the debut album by Fripp's "new" band, the reconstructed King Crimson, is called Discipline. After a long, semireclusive, arty and admirably anti-pop star solo career (and in sharp contrast to the punky simplicity of the short-lived League of Gentlemen), Fripp has decided to step out a bit. The name King Crimson evokes big sounds, big concerts and big sales. Also, this regrouping marks Fripp's calculated reinterpretation of the meaning of those large-scale expectations.

Emerging from the Brian Eno-Talking Heads-David Bowie-Peter Gabriel axis, Fripp and cohort Adrian Belew are new guitar technocrats. Yet, as with Jimi Hendrix, it's neither technique nor equipment but the creative world of electric sound that's the essence of their visionary approach to guitar playing. Only the brief ballad "Matte Kudasai," (which recalls "North Star" from Fripp's first solo record) and the heavy, abrasive "Indiscipline" sound at all like the old King Crimson in any of their incarnations. And even these songs, like the bulk of the LP, combine elements from Fripp's post-Crimson career and from such related artists as Talking Heads. In Discipline's longest cut, "The Sheltering Sky," Bill Bruford's gentle, tapped-out African slitdrum pulsations and Tony Levin's growling bass drones combine with sinuous guitar-synthesizer lines into something like Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's "Fourth World" music.

In most of the tracks, Fripp introduces étude-like guitar figures, which he repeats, à la Philip Glass, as he did in Under Heavy Manners' "The Zero of the Signified." The band weaves in and out of these patterns in complex polyrhythmic countermovements, with Belew offering spoken documentary and guitar sound effects on top.

Such obsession with formal difficulties and arty content limits the group's formidable lyrical resources. Only in "The Sheltering Sky" and briefly in "Matte Kudasai" does Robert Fripp soar the way he has on the Fripp and Eno collaborations and as a lead soloist for Gabriel, Bowie, Eno, Blondie, the Roches and Talking Heads. And only in the vigorous "Thela Hun Ginjeet" (anagram for "Heat in the Jungle") does Adrian Belew's speech content seem viable. Here's hoping that, unlike every other King Crimson lineup, this band of virtuosos stays together long enough to transform all of their experiments into innovations.