“Welcome, Crimheads! Good to see you again,” says an ebullient Belew to the New York Town Hall crowd after what can only be described as an absolutely scorching Level Five. Although The ConstruKction Of Light suffers momentarily from some worrying tremors in its architecture as it gets underway, no such issues affect a barnstorming Facts Of Life.
If you wanted to point to a track that showcases all the individual elements circulating within Crimson then you could do a lot worse than play this track with your Powerpoint display: the fizz and whirring of electronica; the combined dovetailed precision of the guitars; prowling bass prone to eruptive snarls; the accented slams of cross-rhythms trading blows across all four instruments; devastating soloing. That this is all combined into a track so dense and heavy it makes a passing white star look like a lightweight.
Of course, that same Powerpoint could easily feature Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part IV and illustrate many similar qualities. Tonight, there’s a limber aspect in the running of the piece perhaps as a result of some of the tweaks in the reharmonised guitar parts and perhaps as a result of the greater movement between Mastelotto and Gunn. Whatever the cause the result is another example of Crimson’s uncanny knack of combining apparently contradictory ideas of tight discipline and wild abandon.
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