UMUR "The Power to Believe" is the 13th full-length studio album by UK progressive rock act King Crimson. The album was released through Sanctuary Records Group in March 2003. The lineup on this album features Adrian Belew on guitar, vocals and electronic percussion, Robert Fripp on guitar, Trey Gunn on Warr guitar and rubber bass and Pat Mastelotto on drums.

The music style on the album is dark and experimental progressive rock. For fans of King Crimson there are as such few surprises, but what made me happy about the music on "The Power to Believe", is the generally high quality level. Songs like "Level Five", "Eyes Wide Open" and "Elektrik" are excellent compositions. Lots of dark atmosphere in addition to the tight and as always innovative musicianship. The quality drops a bit after the really strong string of songs that open the album, but my attention never wanders and overall "The Power to Believe" comes off as a consistently high quality release.

If you ask me "The Power to Believe" is the best King Crimson album since "Discipline (1981)" and it´s highly recommendable to both fans and newcommers. If this turns out to be King Crimson´s last studio album it will make a great testimony. A 4 star (80%) rating is fully deserved.

Warthur An embarrassment of riches, the Great Deceiver box set - whether bought in its original format or as two 2-CD sets - is a treasuring of King Crimson live material ranging from the wake of Larks' Tongues In Aspic to the cusp of Red. The set opens with a full show - a Providence set from 1974, from which the version of 21st Century Schizoid Man was extracted for use on the USA version. I actually prefer the sound here to the one on USA, since the Eddie Jobson overdubs on that one seemed to have been calculated to bring the track closer to its original studio version, whereas here the aura is more definitively of the mid-70s unit.

The rest of the set contains extracts from other shows of varying sizes - some quite substantial, some only snippets. On the whole, I'm not going to give this essential rating simply because I don't think it is essential through and through - shows and tapes inevitably vary in quality, after all, though the cream of the crop is represented here, and furthermore I suspect the package here presents rather more live King Crimson than most people will ever need. I still think that the essential Crimson live album from this era of the band has to be the incomparable Night Watch, which ought to be your first stop in any exploration of live Crimson; this one is great value, but is really for those who simply cannot get enough of them Larks' Tongues.

Warthur Purists might sniff at the overdubs provided by Eddie Jobson - who was never even in any of the King Crimson lineups of the 1970s - to some tracks on this live album, but it's still an exciting document of the Larks'-to-Red-era version of the band. More or less all the tracks come from Larks' Tongues In Aspic or Starless and Bible Black, with an early version of Starless at the end if you have the expanded remaster. Of the major live releases of this iteration of the band, it obviously isn't as expansive as The Great Deceiver; nor does the show here seem to be quite as energetic or interesting as the one captured on The Night Watch, which features more improvisations than this one and has a more frenzied rendition of 21st Century Schizoid Man (this time around the band just do a fairly close cover of the original rather than zooming off on their own unique tangent as in Night Watch).

Still, if you already have those two and like them, it comes heartily recommended - there's a teensy bit of overlap between this set and the shows collected on The Great Deceiver, but not so much as to render the album irrelevant. And when it came out in the mid-1970s it must have been a godsend for Crimson fans to finally have a decent-quality live album as opposed to the miserable Earthbound.

Warthur It's hard to believe today that Earthbound was the first King Crimson live album to see an official release. Today, of course, we have available to us a whole wealth of archival live material from more or less every lineup of King Crimson that ever undertook a tour - indeed, 2002's Ladies of the Road comes from the same tour as this one, and has a vastly superior sound quality. Thus, if Earthbound was a baffling, inessential, and controversial release when it first came out in 1972, here in 2011 it's just a complete embarrassment.

The major problem with Earthbound is, of course, the recording quality. Why the band's label thought this botched recording to cassette (1972-quality cassette, at that) would ever be acceptable for mass release is beyond me, but there you go. On top of that, I *think* that the performances captured on this muzzy, horribly mixed recording are quite sub-par: there's a version of 20th Century Schizoid Man in which the instrumental soloing sections make it quite clear that only two of the band members (Mel Collins and, of course, the honourable Robert Fripp) even remotely possess the chops of the 1969 lineup, a similarly uninteresting performance of Groon, a passable (though still ruined by the recording quality) stab at The Sailor's Tale, and two new jams (Peoria and Earthbound) which consist of Boz boringly scatting into the microphone whilst the band make a fumbling and altogether half- hearted attempt at something resembling funk, both of which are unbearable.

I say I "think" the performances are sub-par - I can't say for sure because the recording quality is so bad I could easily imagine that any good there may have been in these renditions has been washed out by the tape recording. Trust me, the sound quality is terrible, to the point where it sounds like half the album was recorded in the next room away from where the band were playing. And in this day and age, there is no earthly reason why anyone who wasn't a completely uncritical King Crimson fan should feel obliged to track Earthbound down. When one considers all the many, many alternative live Crimson releases - every single one of which is superior to this one - the fact that the thing actually got reissued from time to time is completely baffling. It's a horribly recorded record of below average performances from a comparatively unimportant lineup of King Crimson.

Get USA, get Absent Friends, get the Great Deceiver box, get the Projekts material, get Epitaph, get Ladies of the Road, and get all the other King Crimson live material you could ever want in the world before you even consider wasting a scrap of your money on this one. As far as King Crimson's discography goes, this is as close as it gets to the bottom of the barrel unless you're willing to dabble in bootlegs - and most bootlegs will sound better than this turkey.

Warthur Robert Fripp's decision to bring King Crimson to a close following this album (at least until it regenerated Doctor Who style into the avant-New Wave beast of the 1980s) was baffling at the time to those around him - not least remaining band members John Wetton and Bill Bruford. But I think with the more time passes, the more the decision looks like a stroke of genius. Fripp's predictions about the "dinosaurs" of rock music coming to a bad end turned out to be all too true when the punk revolution happened.

Sure, we might bemoan the lack of respect given to musicianship and technical accomplishment during the white heat of punk, but both of those important things crept back into rock afterwards, and the DIY ethos of the punks - which held that anyone could and should be able to put together a band - recalls Fripp's own belief that it would be "small, mobile, intelligent units" that survived after the fall of the dinosaurs. And it has to be said that Fripp chose precisely the moment to cash his chips, selling up just as the peak of prog's mainstream success was passing by. This decision saved King Crimson from the humiliating fate of many of their contemporaries in the late 1970s or early 1980s - not for them the commercial pandering of 90125-era Yes, or Invisible Touch-era Genesis, or Gentle Giant's last three albums. Fripp's decision saved the band from a situation in which they would have to choose between their musical integrity and commercial success; his subsequent revivals of King Crimson have come about because he had a sound that needed to come out under the KC name, not in response to crass commercial considerations.

Robert's predictions about the music industry as a whole took longer to come true, but the dawning of the Internet age and their shambolic response to it also appears to have proved Fripp right. The fact is that if you want to make experimental, cutting-edge, avant-garde progressive music, you're much better off following the mobile unit approach, and whilst Fripp might have arrived at these realisations through a somewhat cranky route, it's hard to deny that his predictions were right - and came years before anyone else saw it, with the possible exception of Peter Hammill (as seen on Nadir's Big Chance).

It was against this background that Red was produced - with Fripp undergoing this enormous personal change, having the unintended and beneficial side effect of Fripp exerting less control over the recording process which he had previously been inclined to. Not that he needed to; it's clear on here that his collaborators are as much in tune with what needs to be accomplished on the record as he is. A classic from beginning to end, from the furious instrumental Red to the hauntingly beautiful Starless (which others have pointed out is rather like a potted history of the band from 1969 to 1974 in its musical structure), Red more than any other album from the 1973-1974 lineup of King Crimson showcases a powerful vision of the future of music, one which in some respects we still haven't caught up to. In the Court of the Crimson King set the blueprint for most of the progressive rock scene, particularly the more symphonic end of it. Red, quite simply, is the peak of the form. There have been new albums since then that have added their own spin to the genre, but I can think of precious few that reach this level of accomplishment.