Light On Dark Water

I bought this album a year or so ago as a result of having developed an interest in ‘70s progressive rock, a genre which I had disdained when it was current. When I first sampled Red I didn’t think too much of it and thought I would prefer the first two KC albums (this is something like the fifth). But I put it into the cd player in my car at the beginning of the week and didn’t take it out for a full seven days, which is not something I normally do, but this album got under my skin in an unexpected way.

The first song, “Red,” seemed decidedly unimpressive. It’s an instrumental and mainly just a series of angular chugging riffs. I gather it was considered a pretty heavy sound in its day but technology and the quest for sonic-boom-class bottom have allowed the average heavy metal band to far surpass it. The well-I-guess-this-is-okay reaction continued throughout the album. But when it was over I wanted to hear “Red” again. And so it went: a restless and intense mixture of the lyrical and the acerbic, the simple and the avant-garde, and very habit-forming. I probably heard it four or five times through over the course of a week's driving, and I still wasn't tired of it. Again, this is very unusual for me.

Pre-TypePad

http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js