Album title: In the Wake of Poseidon
Artist: King Crimson
Nationality: English
Label: Island
Chronology: Third
Grade: A
Previous Experience of this Artist: Two albums to date
The Trollheart Factor: 4
Landmark value: King Crimson’s most successful album, and their second this year. Looks like they just barely avoided hiring one Elton John as their singer when Greg Lake left. How different might pop, and prog music have been if
that had happened!
Tracklisting: Peace - A Beginning/ Pictures of a City (including 42nd at Treadmill)/ Cadence and Cascade/ In the Wake of Poseidon (including Libra’s theme)/Peace - A Theme/Cat Food/The Devil’s Triangle (i) Merday Morn (ii) Hand of Sceiron (iii) Garden of Worm/ Peace - An End
Comments: A very short (less than a minute) acapella intro, like a hymn or psalm, opens the album then “Pictures of a City” rocks out with a very jazzy feel in its striding, swaggering horns and the vocal melody sounds like something off the debut, perhaps the title track. Also kind of echoes Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”, released the same year. It’s quite frenetic later, but the quiet bass part in about the sixth minute is cool. Chaotic ending then “Cadence and Cascade” slows everything down nicely with a pastoral little ballad, before the title track comes in on a majestic overture and then runs for nearly eight and a half minutes with a sort of Celtic feel to it. Really nice. Actually, stunning. Superb. And other things beginning with s.
There’s a reprise of “Peace” from the opener, this time as an instrumental, then “Cat Food” was apparently a - successful - single for them from this album, very jazzy with some great piano and foreshadowing the kind of thing Spock’s Beard would be playing two decades later. the longest track, an actual suite, is “The Devil’s Triangle”, an eleven-and-a-half minute instrumental broken into three sections. The first cheekily gives the finger to the estate of Gustav Holst, which refused Fripp permission to use “Mars, the Bringer of War” in his music, so he just rearranged it quite cleverly here. They also use a snippet of the chorus from
In the Court of the Crimson King. Totally epic. Ends then on one more reprise of “Peace”.
Favourite track(s): Cadence and Cascade/In the Wake of Poseidon/The Devil’s Triangle
Least favourite track(s): n/a
Overall impression: Superb album, not really any flaws. The shorter tracks are almost negligible slightly lower points, but there’s nothing really on this I don’t like.
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