Crimson & Cohen

We're in the process of moving house and almost everything is in boxes, which renders most of our stuff inaccessible including 90% of our CDs. There is, however a small section sticking out from a mountain of cardboard.

As I no longer alphabeticise my music (not due to a decrease in geekiness, more a lack of time and resource, as well as a fear of ridicule), they're in a fairly random order and I've been selecting the next one in line to play in the car on the way to work. This journey is 20 minutes each way, which happily amounts to pretty much an album length. The first couple out of the hat are: In The Court Of The Crimson King by King Crimson and Songs From A Room by Leonard Cohen, both of which have been a surprising and welcome exercise in nostalgia as I haven't played them for yonks.

Despite a belter of an opening track (21st Century Schizoid Man) though, the King Crimson album quickly devolves into poncy experimentation. I quite like my self-indulgent noodlings as it happens, but it's a even a bit too much for me. To have 20 seconds of silence broken by someone blowing a singular note on a Patagonian nose flute (or something), followed by a drum solo that sounds like Ringo falling down a flight of stairs, sadly crosses the fine line between avant garde and pretentious pap. I'd recommend it to anyone who has time management issues though as it has the effect of making half-an-hour seem like an eternity; the A350 to Melksham the other morning seemed more like Route 66.

Faring better is Leonard Cohen whose voice has dropped an octave with each successive decade since 1969 when the album was released. Sadly, this means that by the year 2009 he'll effectively be sub-audible to humans, and only certain species of whales will able to hear his gravelly monotone, so catch him while you can kids.