Robert Fripp saw King Crimson’s final album of the 80s, Three of a Perfect Pair, as representing the accessible and excessive aspects of the group’s personalities.Accordingly there are huge contrasts and shifts in tone encountered along the way;the dizzying MC Escher-like interlocking patterns of the title track;Nuages’ enigmatic electronic textures;stomp-along, air-punching choruses of Man With An Open Heart and the hard-edged sonic tone poems of Industry and No Warning. The fast-moving, feverish pace of Sleepless, driven by Bruford’s whip-crack timbales and Levin’s driving funk-finger bass posits strange, hybrid dance grooves. However, the intertwining themes and polyrhythms of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part III with its deftly executed daredevil turns steals the show. It would be another ten years before King Crimson would return to the studio.
