Beat brings King Crimson’s early ’80s era to life at Masonic Cathedral Theater – The Oakland Press

Adrian Belew laughed as he told fans at Beat’s show Sunday night, Oct. 27, at Detroit’s Masonic Cathedral Theater that “we had a plan: Let’s play the easiest songs we can play.

“That plan didn’t work,” Belew concluded, although drummer Danny Carey refrained from adding a rim shot.

Suffice to say, there’s nothing easy about any of the 19 King Crimson songs the Beat quartet performed as part of their inaugural tour. But rest assured, the four musicians (Crimson veterans Belew and Tony Levin along with Tool’s Carey and world-class guitarist Steve Vai) were more than up to the task.

Beat focuses on the three King Crimson albums, later revived after a seven-year hiatus, recorded between 1981 and 1984, when Belew and Levin first joined the band. The period marked a reinvention for the Robert Fripp-led progressive rock colossus, adding more jagged, linear dynamics and a tighter song style to the musical mix while maintaining Crimson’s penchant for intricate and complex arrangements. It was a crossroads between prog and new wave, surprisingly bold and different from anything else out there at the time.

On Sunday Beat did justice to that music without slavishly creating it; Even short pieces like “Neurotica,” “Heartbeat,” “Sleepless,” and “Frame By Frame” didn’t cover the original recordings so much as use them as guides, with Vai and Carey contributing their own rock-sized sensibilities. into the mix and guitarist Belew and Levin on bass and Chapman follow suit with performances that built on the parts they created four decades ago.

The result was an exhibition of unapologetic ensemble communication and muso bending, particularly between Belew and Vai on their guitars. For all their instrumental pyrotechnics and precision, the four played consistently in service of the songs, but with enough twists to surprise even the most hardcore Crimson fan over the course of two hours of music, plus a 20-minute intermission.

With a few exceptions in the chronology, the concert was divided into album segments, beginning with 1982’s “Beat,” the middle release of the era, before heading into 1984’s “Three of a Perfect Pair,” which Belew noted Crimson from the early 80s he didn’t play live. a lot, and then we return to 1981’s “Discipline,” of which Beat played all but one of its seven tracks. The mostly compact performances offered reminders of how much music that incarnation of Crimson could pack into short songs, and how much Belew brought from his previous stints with Frank Zappa (“Dig Me”) and Talking Heads (“Waiting Man,” “Elephant Talk”) in the mix. “Waiting Man,” in fact, began the second set with Carey starting out solo on a down-tuned drum kit, with each of her Beat bandmates joining in one by one until the song exploded in its joyous polyrhythmic fury.