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- #1
- Posted: 07/30/2014 19:27
- Post subject: User Pick of the Day #126: Islands by King Crimson [Mies]
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Islands by King Crimson
Chart: Forum Regulars' 500+ Chart by sp4cetiger
User: Mies
Year: 1971
Rank on BEA Overall: 2,938
Average Rating: 73/100
Summary Info: The fourth studio album by English progressive rock band, King Crimson. This is the last album to feature their original symphonic sound, before more in a more jazz-oriented direction.
Details on the implementation and chart selection process of "User Pick of the Day" can be found here and here, respectively. Charts documenting the previous picks can be found here and here.
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- #2
- Posted: 07/30/2014 23:03
- Post subject: Re: User Pick of the Day #126: Islands by King Crimson [Mies
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Ehy thank you for this. I added notes to the album on my chart but forgot to add them in that thread, so I'll add them here:
| Mies wrote: | It took me some time to realize this is King Crimson's best album. It's not as accessible as the debut, it didn't hit me since the first listen like "Red" did, neither it has a generally acclaimed historical value. But it grew on me, and now I can finally tell, with enough security, this is their highest achievement. Part of this thought comes from a subjective view, obviously.
One of the things I love the most about this album is that it never loses a kind of mystery, while other albums by King Crimson, if being magnificent, don't have the same effect on me.
Anyway, I hopefully think I can somehow explain something about its extraordinary greatness.
Like some people already suggested, this album is driven by the musical concept of beauty / destruction of beauty. This concept is the exact expression of the point King Crimson's musical evolution had reached in that period. After having invented progressive, the band took a completely different sound with Lizard, taking a lot of influences from free jazz, and starting going out of the canons of prog itself. But while Lizard is full of jazzy sounds and technical experimentation, Islands brings this experimentation both out of progressive and out of jazz. That doesn't mean the album is pure noise without any compositional rules at all: that would have been extremely easy. The experimentation of Islands is conceptual. It's the last album of their first period, but it could also been seen as the first album of the second period. Everything they did before this album is led to a superior level, and everything they'll do after this album will use musical concepts already expressed here. "King Crimson's present, past and future". To clarify in more specific terms, Islands contains the powerful sentimental melodies of the debut, the jazzy feelings of Lizard, the proto-math aggressive guitar style of Larks' Tongues in Aspic and Red, but also elements taken from classical baroque music, others taken from psychedelia, and maybe even more. The total unicity of the album well expains the meaning of its title: 'islands' lost in the univers of music, wild inexplorated sounds. Islands is a "totalizing and multisensory experience". "It keeps a dreamy charm, and leaves a sort of a golden wake after every listen, as a dreamlike and decadent smell: a melancholic serenity, an intense trascendental stasis".
The title track is the real consecration of the whole album, the synthesis of all the other tracks. Between spacey mystical sweetness and veiled melancholy. King Crimson's psychedelic classicism here developes in a minimal view, achieving something trascendent. The melody is something extraordinary I can't describe well. And it slowly dissolves in a long final: an infinite journey, among mellotron and sax sounds. Beautiful notes create a shiny crescendo, that finally ends softly, gently taking the listener to the shores of heaven. |
Hope you'll find it useful.
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Mercury
Turn your back on the pay-you-back last call
Gender: Male
Location: St. Louis 
- #3
- Posted: 07/30/2014 23:13
- Post subject:
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I did, Mies. That was really beautifully expressed. Loved it.
As for this album, although I've seen it right in front of me in vinyl form hundreds of times I've never heard it. Tonight I will listen to this album that I have ignored so many times. This is another of my Dad's old records that he gave me a few years back. I'm very excited due to the enthusiasm for it on this thread.
_________________
-Ryan
ONLY 4% of people can understand this chart! Come try!
My Fave Metal - you won't believe #5!!!
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- #4
- Posted: 07/30/2014 23:23
- Post subject:
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| Mercury wrote: | I did, Mies. That was really beautifully expressed. Loved it.
As for this album, although I've seen it right in front of me in vinyl form hundreds of times I've never heard it. Tonight I will listen to this album that I have ignored so many times. This is another of my Dad's old records that he gave me a few years back. I'm very excited due to the enthusiasm for it on this thread. |
Thank you! 
Hope you'll find the album interesting, let me know what you think anyway.
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