Without a doubt, this is the Metallic K.O. <\/i>of the progressive rock world.<\/p>\n
Like that classic live Stooges album, Earthbound <\/i>features a band in its death throes playing clanky, lo-fi, abrasive music that\u2019ll likely piss you off. You know how most King Crimson albums are very proper, humorless, technically proficient affairs that can be alternately beautiful, thrilling, angry, and boring? This is the exact opposite. <\/p>\n
The original Earthbound <\/i>was so bad, sonically, that the record company wouldn\u2019t release it in the United States. Sound engineer Hunter MacDonald recorded the brief North American tour on a cassette tape in the rain, so Fripp already was at a disadvantage when he attempted to transfer and master the tapes. And although this reissue tries valiantly, it cannot overcome the inherent flaws of the original recording, meaning you have an album full of distortion and hiss that pushes the needle into the red when the band gets really loud.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, the five songs are taken from four concerts, so they randomly fade in and out and there\u2019s almost no crowd noise (when you do hear them, at least they\u2019re not throwing beer bottles at Boz Burrell, one of the few differences between this and Metallic K.O.<\/i>). And it\u2019s necessary to know that the band was pretty much broken up at this point but the record company made them go on tour after the 1971 release of Islands<\/i>, so things weren\u2019t exactly free of tension. At one point, Fripp commented that this version of the band liked to \u201cjam\u201d instead of improvise; more bluntly, he also said they \u201cliked to blow.\u201d Mind you, coming from Fripp, these are major insults. He even went so far as to try to delete the album from the discography, but as it was an official bootleg, it would never have truly gone away.<\/p>\n
If the music was worth all this, then one could overcome these problems. But oy, this album is a noisy mess. Only two of the five songs were on Crimson albums, while one was a B-side and the other two are onstage jams that made it in place of proper songs. This is by far the jazziest Crimson ever. Hints of Bitches Brew <\/i>can be heard in some of the playing on the title track and \u201cPeoria,\u201d which are interesting but not essential (and feature Burrell attempting to scat-sing, which is funny). Better is the band classic \u201c21st<\/sup> Century Schizoid Man,\u201d with one of Fripp\u2019s best solos, if you can get past Burrell\u2019s shouting robotic voice. Better still is \u201cThe Sailor\u2019s Tale,\u201d a frantic instrumental with a killer bassline that improves on the studio version due to Mel Collins\u2019 sax work and Fripp\u2019s guitar section, which is more fluid here than the clanking, irritating counterpart on Islands<\/i>. It\u2019s the best song here and the best take I\u2019ve ever heard on the track.<\/p>\n But the final 15 minutes are taken up by \u201cGroon,\u201d a complete atonal racket with a couple of decent passages and a lot of awful ones, especially the nadir when Ian Wallace\u2019s snoozefest drum solo decides to go into VCS3 rotoscope mode and oscillate around the speakers. Having enough of this, Fripp then wanks around with some feedback for a while, and then the track just sort of stops. Maybe I\u2019ll drink a pint of tequila later and give this one another shot, because that\u2019s the only way it will be good.<\/p>\n This reissue, however, salvages the release somewhat by including three songs that should have been on the original disc in place of the (somewhat aimless) jams. \u201cFormentera Lady,\u201d \u201cCirkus,\u201d and \u201cPictures Of A City\u201d were all album tracks in the band\u2019s repertoire at the time and are played well; it\u2019s pretty much the only place to hear an original lineup of the band play these songs live, as they were dropped from the setlist for decades. And unlike the other songs, these are solid renditions \u2013 if a bit slower, but no less doom-laden \u2013 of fan favorites. It forms a more complete picture of the tour.<\/p>\n Still, this is a disc definitely for collectors, and even they will have a hard time getting through \u201cEarthbound\u201d and \u201cGroon\u201d more than once, though they will appreciate the bonuses and the accompanying DVD. Crimson has many more live albums out now, making this one unnecessary but still a fascinating, flawed disc with obnoxiously bad sound quality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":33431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5758],"rating":[11204],"class_list":["post-45248","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-king-crimson","rating-rating-c-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45248"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45248"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}