King Crimson - The ConstruKction of Light (2000)

Early 2000s were something else. For some reason this era was extremely weird for long established rock/prog bands. Sooo much weird and wacky stuff was released between 2000 and like 2006. Despite 2000s being probably my all-time favourite era of music, this tacky-ass stylistic approach to record making didn't serve the old bands well.

In my mind, The ConstruKction of Light falls in the same genre of albums like Jethro Tull's "J-Tull Dot Com", Deep Purple's "Rapture of the Deep" or Iron Maiden's "Dance of Death". Look, even the covers have the same aesthetic to them! The thing is that I'm generally a huge fan of these bands, but I absolutely love King Crimson.

The direction the band tries to tackle there is kinda off-putting at first. They've lightened up completely and dropped the whole "serious band" aesthetic for good. In exchange, they introduced more "comedy"(?) into their musical vocabulary and brought to the table A LOT of electronic influences. The album is just doused in midi and loud, electronic synth noise, to the point that it almost is an industrial metal record! I like this general direction and I love the overall stance the band had back then, but the studio sound feels admitedly uncanny and unrefined. Live it's a different story! They brought back improv sessions, often focusing on the electronic sounds in them. They started playing these weird medleys/more formless pieces (like "Tomorrow Never Knew Thela"), covered Bowie's "Heroes" (allowing Robert to perform the song again after all these years!) and did the whole ProjeKcts thingy. The band sounded exeptionally energetic, modern and fresh at that time, so it's a shame that the original studio stuff imo doesn't really reflect that. Though it's gonna be all fixed by the bands subsequent release...

Anyway, the opening song, "ProzaKc Blues" is borderline unbearable. There's this awful down-pitching filter on Adrain's voice, the guitars play mainly uncoherent noise, the background synth is too loud and corny, and I guess the lyrics are supposed to be funny? Like, I get the point and I admit, the song has its charm and sometimes I come back to it, but I cannot imagine anyone hearing this and not thinking of turning the track off at least once during its duration... And this is imo the greatest problem of this record. It doesn't really try to treat itself seriously, so most of the time the band is just goofing around doing whatever. At least "ProzaKc" is somewhat catchy, memorable and interesting for what it tries to do, but this goddamn song about oysters... Like bro .

The title track is my absolute favourite thing about this album. Well the second part of it at least. The first part is just Trey and Pat grooving around while guitarists exchange single notes between each other. And while it might sound interesting, it certainly isn't worthy taking so much time of the song... Btw, it always reminded me of something Dream Theater would do for some reason. Anyway the song's just awesome! It contains one of the most genuinely beautiful passages in KC's entire discography. It's so harmonious and colorful sounding... And the hard-hitting drums complement this part perfectly. After that, the vocals start delivering very abstract and strange incantation consisting of various ethereal words. Then the lyrics take a radical turn and start talking about uhhhh "penis on an alien" and stuff... Yeah they are what they are, but the song hits hard at almost all levels and it's among my favorites by KC.

"Into the Frying Pan" on the other hand is the song that I enjoy. Something about it's drums and main riff makes it interesting and very likeable for me. The bridge is also really cool it's sooo heavy and industrial sounding. I wish the song was less repetetive tho, or at least just a couple minutes shorter. It has much potential and I come back to it from time to time.

The next track, called "FraKctured" could be one of the messiest and most wankiest KC tracks ever. It's long and bloated, tho not much happens in it apart from Fripp playing some random bleep bloop guitar wankery up and down the fretboard... Some may enjoy it, but after the pretty atmospheric and neat sounding intro, the song instantly falls off for me and doesn't grab my attention like at all.

When it comes to the fourth installment of the "Larks" suite, this one is easily my least favorite among the all five pieces. It's just bloated and boring, just like the previous song. Interestingly enough it indeed features a lot of musical motives that appeared in earlier parts. That hadn't really been the case in any other parts to this extent. I guess some riffs and sections are ok but I'm not a fan of this song at all.

For some reason the album has this weird quirk of separating the tracks into many, identically titled "sub-tracks". This happens in "Larks" too, but the last part (the one with "We Didn't Start the Fire"-style vocals...) is titled "Coda: I Have a Dream".

The record finishes off with "Heaven and Earth", which is just another forgettable filler track that I've never see anybody talk about.

Before I finish, I wanted to add one more thing. Another quirk of this LP is an uncharacteristicly intense for King Crimson level of nostalgia and refferences to the past. Almost every song either mentions earlier song by name (!!!) or expands on it in some way. ProzaKc's lyrics mention "Elephant Talk" and title track's lyrics allude to "Dinosaur". Not to mention the whole existence of "FraKctured" and "Larks IV"...

I guess the album is "ok". Yeah it is annoying and unserious, but the overall direction the band was heading feels very modern, despite this sound kinda aging like milk. Overall soundfount of 2000s KC is something that I always enjoyed, so I don't hate this album at all, but sitting through its entire length admitedly isn't an easy task...