King Crimson - Great Deceiver 2 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

CASSETTE. Canada's METZ are a return to everything that's good about loud, ecstatic live music; a frantic nod to Nation of Ulysses, Shellac, the Pixies, the Jesus Lizard, and Public Image Ltd. At their most vicious, while carving out some heavy new business. METZ have been around for over three years, sharing stages with Mission of Burma, Mudhoney, Oneida, and NoMeansNo. METZ was produced by band and recorded by Graham Walsh (Holy F**k) and Alexandre Bonenfant. METZ articulate with deafening clarity what we've known for some time The world of good music needs a new power trio, and this is it.

At first glance it may have seemed like overkill, 4CDs of live unreleased material from only one of several of the King Crimson line-ups covering a 9 month period of performing, to be issued within a mere 18 months of a previous 4CD (the 3 studio, 1live 'Frame by Frame') Crimson retrospective boxed set. All the more so when considered against the fact that one of Crimson's key markets, the USA, where much of the material had originally been recorded, was reported to be 'hostile' towards live recordings as a general rule. Nor was there any vast enthusiasm shown for the project elsewhere - with the customary exception of Japan - until the set was issued, warmly received critically, promptly purchased by fans & sold out of retail outlets who proved rather more accepting of the set than record company logic dictated they should have been.

2CD set with new artwork, containing all the original diaries and notes from the original editions, this remains an essential recording. The 1973/74 touring line-up of King Crimson has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most dynamic, powerful, exciting live rock bands of that or any other era of rock's roughly half-century chronology. The Great Deceiver, originally issued in 1992 as a 4CD collection of some of those concerts, has earned a fine reputation as a definitive chronicle of the band in performance. At the time of there were about 120 bootleg recordings of King Crimson live concerts. While there was some duplication of shows trading under different names, the bulk of the recordings concentrated on this quartet line-up that became an enduring influence for a generation of musicians. But there was no official document of the live band. USA, the single vinyl album drawn from some of the band's final shows, had yet to be issued on CD. So the band's live reputation rested somewhere between those lucky concert attendees who'd seen them at the time & a variety of poor & worse copies of copies of recordings now being enshrined with all their faults on discs of dubious origin. Robert Fripp had an answer to this dilemma in the form of a series of live multi-track recordings from 1973/74.