Starless

Red was the last studio album the original King Crimson recorded before Robert Fripp dissolved the band in September 1974. He did not announce this in advance. The musicians came to the sessions and made the album, and then it was over. “Starless” closes Red knowing what it is — whether consciously or not, it has the quality of a valediction, a final statement from a band that had spent five years redefining what rock music could be.

The opening section is built on John Wetton’s mournful bass and mellotron — one of the most heartbreaking melodies in the King Crimson catalog, played with the restraint of someone who knows the song has room to develop and refuses to spend its emotional reserves too early. Wetton sings above this with the particular quality of his voice in the middle 1970s: weathered, earnest, capable of genuine pathos without sentimentality.

Then, around the five-minute mark, the melody stops. A two-note bass figure begins. And “Starless” becomes something else entirely.

The middle section — five minutes of that bass figure, gradually accumulating intensity as the guitars enter, as Mel Collins’s saxophone begins to scream, as the whole arrangement builds toward something almost unbearable — is one of the most extraordinary slow builds in rock music. The harmonic language is dark. The tempo is hypnotic. The addition of each new element is perfectly timed. And then, when it reaches the point of maximum intensity, it collapses back into the opening melody.

“Starless and bible black.”

The return of the opening theme, after five minutes of that grinding, ascending middle section, is an emotional event that is difficult to describe without the experience. The beauty that was present at the start is now weighted with everything the middle section put into it. The valediction is complete.

Robert Fripp would eventually reconvene King Crimson in various configurations. Nothing they made afterward sounds quite like this.