For Fans of In the Court of the Crimson King

Robert Fripp's guitar gets the credit, and reasonably so, given the sheer ferocity of the opening track. But the emotional core of In the Court of the Crimson King is the mellotron: that strange, tape-loop keyboard instrument that sounds like a string section that has been underwater for a decade. Ian McDonald's command of it gives the record its particular grief. No synthesizer has ever replicated it because the mellotron's imperfection is inseparable from its power.

Progressive rock lyrics are easy to mock, and Sinfield's are not immune. But at their best, on the title suite and on "Epitaph," they achieve something genuinely unusual: a kind of formal medieval tone applied to contemporary dread. The lineage is Blake and Keats filtered through psychedelia, and it works because the music is ornate enough to hold the weight. Later lyricists in the genre tried the same thing and mostly produced pastiche.

The original King Crimson made In the Court of the Crimson King and then fell apart. The 1972-74 lineup of Fripp, John Wetton, Bill Bruford, and David Cross made Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black, and Red, three records that are collectively harder, stranger, and more emotionally violent than anything the first band achieved. Red in particular sounds like a band deliberately destroying everything it built, and it is magnificent.

Before Black Sabbath's debut, before Led Zeppelin II, before most of what we now call heavy metal was named, King Crimson opened their first album with a track that contained polyrhythmic aggression, distorted saxophones playing chromatic lines, and a midsection of pure improvised chaos. The song's DNA runs through everything from progressive metal to math rock to post-hardcore. Most bands that cite it as an influence are still catching up.