Eight days into King Crimson’s North American tour things are going well with the band sounding extremely confident. This tour represents a consolidation of the toe-hold in America that the group established in the fall of the previous year. At times the quartet sounds like they are playing on ‘home turf’ and benefiting from the extra boost that bands receive in such circumstances.
This is evidenced early in the set with a particularly powerful and sure-footed rendition of Discipline. In these moments, the gamelan-inspired interlocking of the twin guitars captures something rather magical as the dizzying motifs circulate about each other. In some respects, it’s not too dissimilar to stumbling upon a murmuration of birds.
While audiences had largely accepted the material from the Discipline album, the band was also using the concert platform to introduce new numbers for the quartet's impending recording sessions for its second album.
Thus Manhattan, Neil And Jack And Me, having been premiered live the previous year while still under construction are now nearing the final stages of their completed form. The improv intro to The Howler provides a small glimpse of Crimson stretching out into an oblique, more abstract space which in retrospect could have been more fully explored given the general high-octane velocity with which Crimson set moved at this point.
Another new number, Absent Lovers, which would have the distinction of joining the ranks of the few tracks abandoned by the band in the recording studio, provides the closing track on what is a great-sounding audience recording of the band in top form.
4 November 2024
