KING CRIMSON — USA (review)

KING CRIMSON — USA album cover Live album · 1975 · Jazz Related Rock Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Warthur
Purists might sniff at the overdubs provided by Eddie Jobson - who was never even in any of the King Crimson lineups of the 1970s - to some tracks on this live album, but it's still an exciting document of the Larks'-to-Red-era version of the band. More or less all the tracks come from Larks' Tongues In Aspic or Starless and Bible Black, with an early version of Starless at the end if you have the expanded remaster. Of the major live releases of this iteration of the band, it obviously isn't as expansive as The Great Deceiver; nor does the show here seem to be quite as energetic or interesting as the one captured on The Night Watch, which features more improvisations than this one and has a more frenzied rendition of 21st Century Schizoid Man (this time around the band just do a fairly close cover of the original rather than zooming off on their own unique tangent as in Night Watch).

Still, if you already have those two and like them, it comes heartily recommended - there's a teensy bit of overlap between this set and the shows collected on The Great Deceiver, but not so much as to render the album irrelevant. And when it came out in the mid-1970s it must have been a godsend for Crimson fans to finally have a decent-quality live album as opposed to the miserable Earthbound.
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