King Crimson - Lizard

2004 reissue of the band's 1970 album. Discipline. Album Description

An Experimental Masterpiece!

King Crimson's third album released in 1970. It's full of experimentation and in the five songs featured there's a fine mix of rock, jazz, and classical influenced stuff and it's all great!

The last song, the album's main piece, is "Lizard". A multiple part epic that lasts around 23 minutes, yet for me, it never has a dull moment alternating between quiet classical sounding passages with Fripp's nice mellotron playing, excellent piano played by Keith Tippet and on the other hand you get jazzy passages full of wind instrumentation like oboe, sax, and trumpet. Sometimes the intensity rises and it becomes quite frightening indeed! Also there's a surprise as well. In the beginning Jon Anderson from the group Yes gets to sing the vocals!!! Great surprise indeed! The highlight for me it's near the end where Fripp plays an electric guitar solo that has one of his signature lead sounds and it's great!
"Happy Family" is another jazz workout while "Lady Of The Dancing Water" is a very quiet ballad that features some excellent flute playing from Mell Collins and it's the shortest song on the album at 2 minutes and a half. I wish it was longer!
Then you add the slightly funky sounding "Indoor Games" and the opener "Cirkus" where Fripp opens the album with his ever-present haunting mellotron sound and you get a masterpiece of an album!
The singer who also plays bass is Gordon Haskell. While not having the world's greatest voice, I think it complements nice with the music. I thought it was alright.

In conclusion this is an awesome album! Highly recommended if you like experimental music and prog rock.
August 4, 2008

Bizarre

In the hit-and-miss world of early 70s King Crimson, Lizard is a hit; unlike the unoriginal Poseidon and the pedestrian Islands, it's a surprisingly strong record by a band that never really managed to get its act together until 1973. Gordon Haskell's unconventional vocals are usually a prime target for ridicule, but they fit this album reall well. Haskell sounds much better than Boz Burrell and even Greg Lake's prog melodramatics grow old after a while. The cool thing about Lizard is that it's so damn strange -- there's no other King Crimson album that even tries to match its mutant mix of jazz, rock, and classical. The band even tries to tackle the super-cliche of progressive rock, a 20 minute epic suite with Jon Anderson of Yes on vocals, and manages to turn the cliches inside out. How many other prog epics have a Bolero section with dissonant multi-horn improvisation? Side one has four shorter pieces. "Happy Family" gets slammed a lot, but Gordon Haskell's manic, processed vocals, Pete Sinfield's obscure lyrics and the schizophrenic free jazz blowing make a great combination. One of Crimson's best tunes ever. Add that to "Cirkus", "Lady of the Dancing Water" (some beautiful flute on that one), and the Anglo-funk from Pluto of "Indoor Games", and you've got a great batch of music.

[This review is based on the 2000 reissue, which has perfectly good sound quality.] April 27, 2008

Exquisite Crimson masterpiece....

This is one of Crimson's forgotten and misunderstood albums. I've always really like it. It's extremely gentle for the most part, with just enough outbreaks of cacophony for us long time fans (especially on the song Happy Family). The band was in great flux at this time (Robert Fripp was the only consistent member of the band since its inception, and the album was written in its entirety by Fripp and lyricist Pete Sinfield), but you couldn't really tell from the album itself. I really like the exquisite musical interplay going on here, especially in Andy McCulloch's drumming. He's playing very complicated structures, but somehow it's very gentle and light. Lizard is softer than most Crimson albums, and it's still as intricate and as complex as anything they put out, but it's not as showy as other albums. I really like Cirkus, the first song, and I absolutely love the title track, an epic masterpiece and the longest song Crimson has yet to record. The opening movement, Prince Rupert Awakes, has a great lead vocal by Jon Anderson of Yes (a band Fripp almost joined), and the rest of the song moves from this beautiful first movement.

If you're just getting into Crimson, this may not be the place to start, but if you dig them, you should really pick this one up. April 21, 2008

underated and over looked

Crimson album no 3 has long been one of my personal favorites- of course, the first time I heard it, I had no idea what the hell to make of it. It was very similar to In The Court Of The Crimson King and In The Wake of Poseiden, yet very,very different and a bit more bizzare. More jazz-fusion oriented , Lizard is also much darker and brooding than the first 2 crimso albums- even the light, humorous sections ("indoor games" "happy family")have an undercurrent of menace- as if something horrible is lurking just around the next verse. In fact a lot of it sounds like Herb Alpert gone horribly insane.
Over time The album grew on me. Over time came to regard "Cirkus" as one of my favorite crimson tunes. it starts the album off one a deliciously erie note , going from quiet to loud and interjecting a beautiful instrumental middle section before whirling like a dirvish to an explosive finale. "indoor games" and "happy family" provide the album with its sence of humour- something the last 2 albums lacked. Totally of the wall, Indoor games has a bouncy rythem where all the brass is played slightly out of tune as we discover what the "upper crust" do with their free time when they think noone is watching, complete with somewhat suggestive but giggle inducing lyrics. "happy family" is a jarring piece of lunacy with a barely discernable main theme and a time signature thats barely there in spots..at least during instrumental moments. quirky but effective and intertaining.
"Lady of the dancing water" is a beautiful acoustic piece that stands apart from the rest of the album and provides a nice interlude before the musical madness continues. the second half of the album is the title track- beginning with the breathtaking "prince rupert wakes" featuring vocals by jon anderson of yes,and heavy orchestral mellotron, it moves into "the peackocks tale" abolaro with trumpets and claranets aplenty, going form starkly beautiful to mind numbingly creepy, peacock's tale leads into the "battle of glass tears- a frantic musical representation of a battle thatwill knock you out of your seat while giving you the creeps. the album ends with a boom, boom, of bass drums overlayed with some guitar by fripp in a creepy finally that suddenly gives way to cirus music as it fades in it slows and speeds up jarringly, speeding up one final time as it fades out completely, ending the album on a jarring, usettling fasion. Great stuff, but if your not into jazz fusion, this album will drive you up the damn wall. an underrated work of genius in my view. January 31, 2008

Absolutely remarkable

This album was and is a remarkable achievement, probably far less accesible than most other Crimson works and not one for the new Crimson listener. Most later fans of the band would be hard pressed to believe that Fripp plays only classical guitar on virtually all of side one, some great mellotron work throughout not to mention the wonderful horn and woodwind work on side two. Wonderful early fusion from 1970 especially on side two of the original vinyl 'the lizard suite'. I'm a Crimson fan since the early 70's and have always considered 'larks tongues' their greatest achievement but for some reason still find myself listening to this more than any other of the works. Must have for any prog rock fan. December 10, 2007

More reviews at Amazon.com ...