To be honest, it actually feels good to be wrong.

King Crimson - The Power to Believe

Release: 2003
Genre: Progressive rock, things that kill Nick's faith in modern music
Label: Sanctuary Records
Length: 51:11

Nick's Rating: 3/5

I had a really shitty day today when I wrote this... so I ask in advance that you all please excuse me if I'm being more of a jackass than usual. But really, now. I'm a fan of King Crimson, too, and this album just makes me want to bash my head into a bank vault's door.

I am a big fan, by the way, of the reviews of George Starostin. In the old version of his site, he had separate little pages for every band whose music he reviewed. Each would have a series of some albums marked with headers like "Best album ever," or "Most underrated album." If he had it, surely The Power to Believe would get King Crimson's "Most overrated album" title. I don't get how this album can be called a massive slam dunk when The ConstruKction of Light gets shit upon relentlessly. They. Are. The. Same. Fucking. ALBUM! About the only difference is that Power is significantly more confident. Better quality, though? Not on your life.

Let me immediately sort out every unnecessary song from this album. "The Power to Believe I" is a throwaway, as is the "Facts of Life Intro" that is indexed as a separate track on what remains of my copy (I sold it back to the used shop I bought it from, just so you know, I was that fucking disappointed in it -- but I still have the MP3 rip because the album sports some nice tunes.). Worthless throwaway, too. "Power I" is pleasant enough, I guess, but it's not something you'll come back to. "Eyes Wide Open" fares much better... but I wouldn't notice it if it were gone. It's an attempt to milk the beauty of "Walking On Air" from THRAK for all it's worth.

Next on the chopping block: "Happy With What you Have to Be Happy With" -- fun, yes. Fun once. After that it's the musical equivalent of a child saying "Are we there yet?" every three seconds in the car. Is it a parody on nu-metal? It sure is awful enough for it. But, parody or not, this is way too repetitive for the Crim I know. Even then, why? What does this band need a nu-metal parody for? Is Robert Fripp that jealous that he doesn't get radio airplay that he needs to resort to smarmy quasi-fuck-the-man posturing? I guess there's a reasonable amount of power to it, but with the sound of the album, replete with near brickwalled masters and electronic drums, of course there's power. Everything has power (or at least faux-power), even "EleKtrik"'s flute opener.

"EleKtrik," by the way, is a good song. Saving grace of the album? Hell no. This eight minute instrumental juggernaut does not leap out and grab you, unless it's to drag you to the skip button. At least, the first few times. The reason for this is a mix of the Two Ps of why early-2000s Crim suck so much -- Production and Pat (Mastelotto, the lone drummer for King Crimson as of their ConstruKction-era reconstruKction). The production, like many modern albums, is such that you could commit a war crime with the contents of the disc. It's yet another hapless victim of the "loudness war," albeit not on level to fight with Vapor Trails or similar. However, it makes the already crappy-sounding electronic drums sound even crappier. Pat Mastelotto, credited with "drums, traps and buttons" played basically just these. I guess the traps and buttons are like vampires and bit the drums somewhere along the way, turning them into more crappy electronics to invade all of the songs that didn't already have non-electronic drums. I have nothing against electronic drums. I'm a big fan, for instance, of Kraftwerk, Rammstein, and Depeche Mode, all of whom use electronic drums extensively. The difference is, they make them sound good because they mesh with the band's sound. They don't mesh with King Crimson, though, so they sound hopelessly out of place and drag the album down.

"EleKtrik," though, is still a good song. It's very well-arranged, which is about all you need out of King Crimson. Well-performed? That goes without saying. Even on a bad day, King Crimson can outplay 99% of bands if all they had to play with were their big toes. "Facts of Life" is easily the best of the vocal songs, but the lyrics do tend to err on the dippy side. "Six billion ants / crawling on a plate / none of the them give back / as much as they take?" Ixnay on the Ooltay, guys. If I wanted crappy post-grunge quasi-punk teenager-friendly "social commentary," I'd listen to bands who actively specialize in it. Mostly facts, indeed, of life, though, so I can't knock them for possibly passing off bullshit as truth to the gullible. Someone said the arrangement is bluesy? My experience with the blues is a little limited, but if you put Pat Mastelotto into a box somewhere far away and let him not play electronic drums, I might give it to you (after you replace the drummer, that is. I hear Vinnie Colaiuta is busy recording an only half-decent album for Megadeth ca. this time. Sic 'em, boys!). Still a cool song despite the sheer sonic ugliness.

"Dangerous Curves," then. Interesting. A high-tension, electronic, dark instrumental with a great buildup. It doesn't go much of anywhere, but who cares anymore? The song is definitely good, and going nowhere seems to be customary for a lot of King Crimson extended dick-arounds. Is it my favorite song on this album? Uh, I'd rather you didn't ask that. That would require me to actually think about this more, and probably go find the used record shop where I sold the album and re-buy it again. It would probably still be there, too. Even if the store had been demolished two years ago. Look up at the cover art: would you want people to know you bought something that looked like that?

So, final count: Three good songs (all long), three pieces of pointless shit (all short), and a lot of middleground (longer). Even if this album were unequivocally bad in terms of arrangement and production, it's King Crimson. It's still pretty good. But it's not worthy of the praise piled onto it by some of the fanbase. It'd make an okay addition to one's CD collection and is an interesting curio. It's not worth the $16 that it's being sold for on the band's site. For a dollar more you can get the far superior Absent Lovers (a 2CD live album from 1984) and get your Fripp/Belew fix. And really, I think I'd be least distressed by the existence of a Steven Wilson-remastered version of this album.

I seem to have gotten off-track, but. Buy it used, I guess.

I swear, fandom will kill music.

If this title, and anything said in here, sounds really extreme and less-than-sane, please understand -- I am in an exceptionally bad mood right now. Over one of my favorite bands of all time, Queensryche.

But not for the reason you think. It is, though, related to their new album, Dedicated to Chaos. Again, not for the reason you think. By now, you've probably heard everyone pissing and shitting themselves over the fact that the album does not sound like the Queensryche of old. So, in short, here is my two-step advice for people who want to hear Rage for Order or Operation: Mindcrime again.

1. Listen to Rage for Order or Operation: Mindcrime.
   
2. Shut the fuck up and go the fuck away.

Very simple. Your opinions on what a band "should" be doing do not matter, and they never will. A band "should" be doing what they think is best. In this case, the songs on Dedicated to Chaos, which are very different from most everything they've done before. This is not Queensryche as we knew them in 1988. This is a good thing.

Queensryche are a progressive metal band. For those of you who don't know, "progressive" is a word meaning "favoring or promoting progress." In short, something that changes. Stagnation can work for some bands. For a progressive band like Queensryche, it absolutely cannot. Yet the "fans" continue to whine about how much the band has changed and how much they want the old sound back. It's natural. I love Rage for Order and Operation: Mindcrime too, because of what they were: whip-smart, technically accomplished, and not boring. The songs on Dedicated to Chaos are exactly this. So maybe the Rage for Order comparisons are pretty acceptable. "Progressive" metal has stagnated. The Dream Theater school is the big one now -- that or the Opeth school. Both bands have produced and continue to produce great albums, don't get me wrong. But they are not progressive anymore. Nor are they backward-looking enough to be called retro, revivalist, or any of those other words that signify a different kind of progress. Let's call it samsara. Endless death and rebirth. Even this is not stagnation. This is the angle Marillion took in the early 80s. This is an angle few bands are willing to truly take anymore. Even those that don't are usually in the alternative rock genre and they reinform themselves with grunge or Nine Inch Nails-class histrionics. Not quite what we're looking for, but a valiant effort.

Dedicated to Chaos could be the breath of fresh air that progressive metal needs, if people could get off their high horses about what genre X or band Y are "supposed" to sound like. But they won't. And they'll keep puking out whatever words come to mind about what they want, when it's right within reach, and it has been for twenty-five years. To be honest, this reminds me of Metallica's Death Magnetic. Fans who managed to cling to the band for all those years wanted a new album of thrash music after all of the "shit" on Metallica, Load, ReLoad, and St. Anger (many of which were subpar, but due not to the genre but the band themselves). When Death Magnetic finally came out, they were lambasted as has-been sell-outs trying to relive former, out-of-reach glories. What would happen to Queensryche if, say, they tried to record an album in the vein of Rage for Order without being updated for the modern world? They would probably be lambasted as has-been sell-outs trying to relive former, out-of-reach glories.

You can see what the problem here is. The fans don't want anything -- except the exact thing over and over again. In which case, do what I do and listen to the old albums over and over again. Listen to your copy of Rage for Order until it dies. I won't consider you a fan of the band if you're only in it for one album or two. Youre a fan of those albums. You mean well, but so does a preacher. Like preachers, some of you mean well but are doing something truly awful for that which you claim to speak for. Cut the crap. Accept that Queensryche as they are now are not Queensryche as they were in 1988, Queensryche were only that, at latest, until 1990. By then, the band woke up and realized that advancing was what they needed to do.

Before anyone says anything about how Chris DeGarmo would have made the album better, shut the fuck up and learn your 'Ryche history. Know what other albums DeGarmo played on? Hear in the Now Frontier and Tribe, both of which are regarded as polished turds or worse in the fandom. DeGarmo is not the nonexistent "problem" -- it's the stuck-up fans.

Understand, though, that I am not saying this album is as good as Operation: Mindcrime. Little is. But it's at least as good as Promised Land, and produces a sound expansion at least as fertile. And for fuck's sake, that's gotta count for something.

Okay. I'm done now. In short: fuck people.