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This is one of the records I treat as a test of musical taste. It’s so dense and emotional that not everyone can handle it. Some might dismiss it as too technical and precise, and there are moments when you could be forgiven for thinking someone has pushed a full dishwasher down a big flight of stairs, so huge is the drumming and percussion.
But it has long been my favourite Crimson album precisely because it is so emotionally charged and doesn’t flinch from that. Fripp’s tone throughout, but especially on the title track is sort of repressed but very sustained. It sounds like he’s turned down all the treble on the guitar to get this deep yearning sound.
Providence was recorded live and most of the pieces were worked out live. The music has an almost classical feel helped by the presence of cello, oboe and violin. Mel Collins throws in some sax too.
Equally Wettons vocal, deep and almost operatic, make the hairs on my arm stand up. In a poetic moment, I once described them as stentorian. It seems ironic that such progressive rock became so emblematic of a sclerotic scene just a year later, and of course both John Lydon and later Kurt Cobain both loved this.
To me, the whole record is a poetic musical expression of the human condition. Ranging from inchoate fury to somnambulant peace. It’s also one of the best examples of Bill Bruford’s drumming brilliance. Alternatively sweeping and detailed, he uses the drums as a melodic instrument in itself. No mere timekeeper.
Above all, it’s profoundly heavy in all meanings of that word. Too heavy for the public as it only spent a week on the UK chart at #45 and made #66 in the USA.
The album bounce from Bananamour by Kevin Ayers is one I’ve had to think about a lot. It’s an esoteric one. Steve Hillage was on the Kevin Ayers album and he was in a band called Uriel. Dave Stewart (not that one, or that one) played keyboards, who was later in the fine jazz-rock outfit Bruford who was on Red. Yay! Everything is related to everything else.
But it has long been my favourite Crimson album precisely because it is so emotionally charged and doesn’t flinch from that. Fripp’s tone throughout, but especially on the title track is sort of repressed but very sustained. It sounds like he’s turned down all the treble on the guitar to get this deep yearning sound.
Providence was recorded live and most of the pieces were worked out live. The music has an almost classical feel helped by the presence of cello, oboe and violin. Mel Collins throws in some sax too.
Equally Wettons vocal, deep and almost operatic, make the hairs on my arm stand up. In a poetic moment, I once described them as stentorian. It seems ironic that such progressive rock became so emblematic of a sclerotic scene just a year later, and of course both John Lydon and later Kurt Cobain both loved this.
To me, the whole record is a poetic musical expression of the human condition. Ranging from inchoate fury to somnambulant peace. It’s also one of the best examples of Bill Bruford’s drumming brilliance. Alternatively sweeping and detailed, he uses the drums as a melodic instrument in itself. No mere timekeeper.
Above all, it’s profoundly heavy in all meanings of that word. Too heavy for the public as it only spent a week on the UK chart at #45 and made #66 in the USA.
The album bounce from Bananamour by Kevin Ayers is one I’ve had to think about a lot. It’s an esoteric one. Steve Hillage was on the Kevin Ayers album and he was in a band called Uriel. Dave Stewart (not that one, or that one) played keyboards, who was later in the fine jazz-rock outfit Bruford who was on Red. Yay! Everything is related to everything else.
