Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind Live in Toronto Review

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Heavy / RPI / Symphonic Prog Team

The band decided to remove the audience in this live recording which gives the impression that you are listening to a studio recording. And what is more interesting is that the songs have been re-worked with iii drummers, some flutes, and saxophones. The rhythm section having more space, the sound is patently louder. The drummer Bill Rieflin is also handling the keyboards parts including that precious mellotron audio on some old songs. The fix listing contains a lot of old songs, some songs later the 80's flow including some new songs. The new songs worked very well with the rest of the songs. "Meltdown" and the Radical Action" suite have some intense moments. And to mix things upward, there are some lighter songs, similar "Epitaph", and the jazzy "Scarcity of Miracles". Let's say that the sound on this 3cd set is fantabulous. As for the Blu-Ray, the band decided again to do something different. They hired only 1 human being behind the camera, who installed stationary cameras then that he had to bring together footage from those cameras to supervene upon the lack of motion that we ordinarily have on a standard video. Those cameras were needed to superimpose fading images of close shots of each musician over the static wide shot of the stage. Most of the material comes from the Takamatsu shows considering it was the best sounding for Jakko Jakszyk. The DTS surround sound is big and loud. They pushed this to the limit with the 3 drummers. However, I could hear some kind of "crackling" noise in a few spots in my rear speakers, especially in the drum solo. In decision, while lacking visuals, the video is still enjoyable. I know that the band wanted to focus on the music, but a little more than visuals tin can't ruin the music. This alive recording gives united states the best overall flick of the band'south discography that every Rex Cherry fan volition enjoy and a lot of Progressive Rock fan.

Pretty sure I tin justify a 5-star rating for this one.

Even being that I've only been listening to it for a calendar week, I can see the evidence of how much work went into this new "Radical Action..." box set. If you are not convinced, first consider that this is a live album in which the best performances of each track accept been culled from their 2015 tours of the UK, Canada and Nihon, and the audition sounds take been thoroughly removed to bring about sonic perfection - making it a (what did they call information technology?) "virtual studio anthology." And if yous still aren't swayed, go on over to All About Jazz'due south website and read their review of this 3-cd + video (extra dvd's if you get the limited edition) box. Y'all will gape at how many mic tracks had to exist manually examined and processed to isolate the drum parts lonely!

This purchase is a decent-sized outlay of money, so some might consider information technology a stretch to say the first rails (the current seven-headed-animate being's rendition of LTIA-1) is worth the price of admission. To be honest though, it's not that much of a stretch - this version sounds crawly, spacious, and *huge*.

The alive/studio versions of "Pictures Of A Urban center," "Easy Money," "Level Five," "Cerise," "Starless," "LTIA-Two," and many other tracks are vivid besides, and the band are as on-course every bit they were in their recently published Toronto (20 November 2015) "Collector's Homemade" ... if not quite equally on-fire. Information technology's fine though: for the grouping'southward intensity seeming merely slightly lower, they've certainly since then developed - or at least discovered how to evince on record - more instrumental flourishes than in that unadulterated full concert recording. This may well -- efficaciously if not definitively -- be rounding out a chapter in the development of King Red, which hopefully will non be their final ane. (Why would it exist, with everyone in the ring, particularly Fripp, playing with enough vim and vigor to put most other acts to shame).

The new strategy of three drummers in the forepart line is used to total effect here. Mel Collins'due south air current parts and Jakko Jakzsyk'southward vocals are solid and well-suited for this incarnation of the band. I am non going to lend any acceptance to those who maintain otherwise ... nor should y'all.

Which leads me on to my complaint that entirely too many have wailed (or at to the lowest degree whinged) that Crim in their current mode are doing solely nostalgia - heck, I think I myself may have semi-seriously joked about that in my Toronto review. But I'd be remiss not to mention that "Radical Action" includes almost a half-hour of new material by the ring. Then pipe downwardly, all you complainers. Take radical activeness by putting on this DVD ( or blu-ray) and submit to getting a better-than-best-seat-in-the-house view of a virtual studio concert at a fraction of the toll of the real affair ! (Or if you lot can't afford the $30 toll tag, at least visit DGM Live'southward youtube publication of the "Like shooting fish in a barrel Money" and "Starless" viddie excerpts.) Times are good.

A stray thought, while unwrapping this lavishly packaged 4-disc live set (iii CDs, plus a Blu-ray disc) from the newly-inflated King Red septet: any happened to the "small, mobile, intelligent units" Robert Fripp was aiming toward in his Drive to 1981?

Since the 1970s Fripp has arguably been the most progressive of any first-generation Prog Rocker, adamant in his resistance to a sentimental reformation of the original band. And yet hither he is, nearing the twilight of his career, on stage performing love chestnuts like "Epitaph", "Sailor's Tale", and (not inappropriately) "21st Century Schizoid Man".

But if the Crimson King isn't looking forrard whatsoever more, he'south at to the lowest degree assembled a formidable unit to help relive the past. And after the letdown of the too-abbreviated "Live at the Orpheum" teaser it's reassuring to see the Crimson monster back on its anxiety...all xiv of them, in this instance.

The flute and sax work of old friend Mel Collins provides a welcome bridge to an earlier, warmer King Cherry-red, and offers an effective proxy for David Cross' violin on the Larks' Tongues-era songs: notation his playful interpolations of Henry Mancini and Rimsky-Korsakov during the proto-metal "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One". Jakko Jakszyk 's phonation is too a honey-toned throwback to the foretime days of Greg Lake and Boz Burrell, giving the new lineup some other valid excuse to exhume such quondam material.

The few new songs offer encouraging evidence that the aging animal hasn't lost all its teeth nevertheless, despite this being more than of a reunion ProjKct than a creative rebirth. Merely nostalgia was conspicuously the order of the solar day, with a conspicuous hole in the set-list shaped like Adrian Belew, finer airbrushed out of the repertoire as completely and mercilessly as Gordon Haskell once was. The just selections from his more than 25-years at the front of the Scarlet stage are Fripp-equanimous, or entirely instrumental.

And Belew isn't alone in his exile: the entire audition was amputated from these alive tapes, in classic Fripp-similar fashion. The guitarist as long been notorious for his stage reticence, needing the attention of a receptive crowd to synergize his performance, just always at arm'south length, and preferably without photographs. Perchance he decided to simply deport that wallflower impulse to its logical end.

The 1974 LP "Starless and Bible Black" followed the aforementioned arroyo, camouflaging a live recording equally a studio album. Merely that was with all-new fabric, non the familiar oldies presented in these shows. Consequently there's a sense of detachment hither at odds with a genuine live experience, all part of a calculated (and quintessentially Frippish) design extending to the matching formal stage outfits and choreographed vocal arrangements, dissever between 3 drummers.

And, outside of a few "B'Blast"-style interludes, at that place isn't any improvisation. Understandable perhaps, given the logistics of such an unwieldy ensemble. But information technology's still disappointing to see a cage tied around the historic Crimson ideals of serendipity and happy accidents.

All of which probably reads like excessive Monkey Mind griping nigh an album I'g however calling 'an fantabulous add-on to whatsoever Prog Stone music collection'. Criticism bated, the sound is tremendous, the performances closed, and the older songs (ignoring the umpteenth reincarnation of "Crimson") fresher than e'er, perfectly at ease aslope the new stuff. Imagine the aging monarch donning his former robes and finding they not simply still fit, merely after more than 45-years are nearly back in fashion.

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