One of my favorite albums, and one that is not available on CD or digital, and so I am happy to have a turntable and play my vinyl copy.
This may not really be a masterpiece in a clinical or academic sense, but I laud it highly because of how much I have enjoyed it over the years and have been influenced by the conversational out takes: "rock and roll is about fucking..."
https://postpunkmonk.com/2022/08/08/record-review-robert-fripp-league-of-gentlemen-us-lp-part-1/
Record Review: Robert Fripp – “League Of Gentlemen” US LP [part 1]
Robert Fripp’s “Drive To 1981” culminated in a trio of albums for that most significant year. The first out of the box was perhaps the most surprising of the Fripp albums of that period. “The League Of Gentlemen” was a strange mixture of Fripp’s concept of a high-octane “New Wave Instrumental Dance Band” graced with a few stabs at “found vocal collage” such as we heard earlier on “Exposure,” and some minimal instrumental work that seemed to be an outlier to nowhere in the Great Fripp Plan. Little did we know that King Crimson would be manifest again within six months when this zippy [and occasionally, frantic] little record dropped down the chute in March of 1981.
Robert Fripp: The League OF Gentlemen – US – LP [1981]
- Indiscreet I
- Inductive Resonance
- Minor Man
- Heptaparaparshinokh
- Dislocated
- Pareto Optimum I
- Eye Needles
- Indiscreet II
- Pareto Optimum II
- Cognitive Dissonance
- HG Wells
- Trap
- Ochre
- Indiscreet III
To hear Fripp speak of it now, the reason why there were three “indiscretions” inserted into the running time and accounting for 5:48 of the album was down to Johnny Toobad’s chemical habit. The band’s drummer only actually played on two of the album’s tracks [“Heptaparaparshinokh” and “Dislocated”], leaving Kevin [China Crisis] Wilkinson the rest of the album to drum on. Namely, lack of material. But since he indulged in similar microcassette hijinx on his “Exposure” album, I would suggest that he put them there because he wanted to. Otherwise, knowing Fripp, he would have just improvised something to fill the space [see: “Moonchild”]
The “indiscretions” here were a mixed bag of Fripguru J.G. Bennett’s pontifications, his partner at the time, poet Joanna Walton discussing rock and roll with various others, an unidentified woman moaning sexually, as well as nuclear anxiety bomb sirens going off. Ironically, that same year Duran Duran debuted and claimed they wanted to be the band people were dancing to when The Bomb dropped, so it looked like Fripp was sinking his teeth deep into the neck of the zeitgeist with this album.
Subsequent issues of this material over the years have been hit or miss but one thing absolutely missing were these Indescretions. I suspect that it may have something to do with Ms. Walton’s death in the Lockerbie bombing incident in 1988 and Fripp’s ill ease at having these cavalier snatches of conversation representing her memory.
The impetus of this album was for Fripp, a notoriously intellectual player, to finally embrace the messy, physical nature of Rock music face to face with material intended to be danced to. So the album was often constructed of Fripps’ almost inhuman guitar ostinatos repeated four to the bar while Barry Andrews [ex-XTC, “Exposure”] added organ runs and drones to provide counterpoint. With the rhythm section staying minimal to anchor it all. Dance music for sure… but for weirdos. [This weirdo raises hand]
“Inductive Resonance” roared out of the starting blocks with an energetic organ glissando and an oscillating, rhythmic organ figure that may have been bounced through a delay for maximum potency. Fripp’s melodic lines were loopy rondos in a minor key to provide maximum contrast. By the song’s midpoint Fripp’s ostinatos were getting inhumanly fast, before the middle eight where they kicked into overdrive. Through all of the flurry of 16th notes, Mr. Andrews’ organ provided a cheery counterpoint to Fripp’s increasingly manic guitar. As if you played “96 Tears” at 78 rpm and dared Fripp to keep up, only to have him reach double time.
Ms. Dax ca. 1981 © Akido hada
The album next took a shift to somewhere else to allow for the unique presence of Danielle Dax [then with Lemon Kittens – she also provided the cover drawing here] to offer sprechgesang verbalizing and lyrics on the arresting
Minor Man.” Fripp’s anxiety-inducing chording here suggested a further exploration of the vibe he had begun exploring on “Exposure’s ” “I May Not Have Had Enough Of Me But I’ve Had Enough Of You.” With Fripp’s climactic eruption of frenzied chords I half expect to hear “First Inaugural Address To The I.A.C.E. Sherborne House” blast afterward each time I listen.
While the album had been a wild ride thus far, with no two tracks seemingly alike, this was changing again for the impossibly cheerful pre-release single “Heptaparaparshinokh.” Leave it to Fripp to name what was the most infectious earworm here after Gurdjieff’s Sacred Law of the Sevens. That very well may be, but the guitar here is simply among the most joyous pieces that Mr. Fripp had ever committed to tape with nesting rondos of ever increasing, crosspicked complexity lifting our mood with each second while the organ of Mr. Andrews glowed like a miniature sun.
The second [?!] single from the album was the pressure cooker of “Dislocated” where Fripp and Andrews alternated clouds of anxious “stinger” chords to spar with Johnny Toobad’s aggressive drumming, which added fills to complete with the organ and guitar for our immediate attention. Giving us a single which was the musical antithesis to the first.
The album also had a pair of tracks called “Pareto Optimum” which sounded like little else out there, with clusters of bell-like tones repeating and resolving into patterns. I don’t think that there was a guitar within miles of these two [or the similar “Ochre”] being laid down to tape. It sounded for all the world like Mr. Andrews playing a Selmer Pianotron into a four second tape loop, as the tracks explored the ideal of their titles; a state where no actor/criterion can be improved without introducing an element of diminishment to another. But, as it turns out, this theory is very wrong. Mr. Andrews reports that we are actually hearing Mr. Fripp playing a synth of indeterminate provenance [“a Roland something or other…”] …into a tape loop. Well, with tape loops involved, the music did scream “Fripplike” even as the division of labor within the band was seemingly clear cut.
Next: …Needles In A Camel’s Eye
https://postpunkmonk.com/2022/08/09/record-review-robert-fripp-league-of-gentlemen-us-lp-part-2/
Record Review: Robert Fripp – “League Of Gentlemen” US LP [part 2]
[…continued from last post]
One of the most astonishing songs here, “Eye Needles,” was built on urgent tick-tock rhythms played furiously on keys that had Fripp soloing with a shower of double picked notes before hanging back to beefier chords that then shifted the spotlight back to Barry Andrews equally fast organ playing. Which had the last word with a series of precise melodic runs that stopped on a dime. This is one of those songs that is so urgent, that I can sometimes forget to breathe when listening.
‘Cognitive Dissonance” opened with a splay of yes, dissonant chords while soundbites from J.G. Bennett tapes provided found vocals. Fripp’s guitar work was moving all over the scales, rarely staying in one zone as clouds of organ chords bloomed around the often high velocity runs that Fripp was unleashing. While Fripp was attracted to speedy torrents of notes, “H.G. Wells” was a rare beast in that the tempo was relatively slow. There were more found vocals of an unknown nature here with a woman’s conversational voice at some points repeating what sounded like aphorisms with an unwelcome return of the woman we’d heard simulating an orgasm back in “Indiscreet I.” As the relentless guitar and rhythm plowed forward with single minded determination, it was down to Mr. Andrews shimmering organ chords to provide the contrast here.
The flanged guitar chords on “Trap” added unnerving tension to the jittery organ lines that oscillated throughout the song. Then Fripp joined in on the vibratory exploration. The song continued to rise up the scale until a surprising burst of Crimsonian energy from Fripp that sounded like a dry run for the imminent “Discipline” album. The climax and coda for this one was definitely a King Crimson outlier; sounding more dazzling than a “New Wave dance band” had any need to be. Fripp’s tone in the coda also previewed where he’d be going with “The Sheltering Sky” in a few months’ time.
More keyboard/tape loop experimentation from Fripp occurred on “Ochre” with a more synthetic, less percussive patch than the “Pareto Optimum” cuts had used. This ended up being more melodic than those and an interesting relative of his Frippertronic work.
Then the album ended with the third “Indiscreet” cut. Offering Fripp a chance to comment editorially via sound bites taken from a variety of sources. Some from media. Others from his “indiscretions” which were down to Fripp’s penchant at the time for carrying a microcassette recorder to capture unguarded moments as well as his conversations [See: “Thela Hun Ginjeet”].
It’s surprising to listen to this and hear all of the voices on tape that factor into this album. At times, it threatens to find adjacent space to what David Byrne and Brian Eno had been doing just prior with “My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts” but here the voices are more separate from the music. Less intrinsic, and given to irony and sarcasm.
The transition from solo Fripp, with a studio full of high powered guests [see: “Exposure”], or either completely alone with Frippertronic loops, to building a band around him to rely upon for a framework for his playing marked an important transition in the final part of “The Drive To 1981.” The sound of “The League Of Gentlemen” was the sound of him reconnecting with the possibilities, dynamics, and responsibilities of a band.
It’s all done with a wide variety of approaches within the LOG framework. The seeds of “Discipline” were beginning to sprout here, but by the same token, so were those of Barry Andrews’ forthcoming big splash, Shriekback. The journey from his hyperkinetic keys from the XTC albums where he first caught our attention to the phase represented on “Exposure” and here revealed the artist dialing down energy levels to touch on drones here that were to be a defining feature of the early Shriekback. Especially “Care” where the austerity and sonic space were intrinsic to much of that music.
In 2017, I finally made myself a CD of this title, since I felt it was not likely to ever reach the silver disc in a fashion identical to the 1981 LP. The 1985 CD, “God Save The King,” was a compilation taken from “God Save the Queen/Under Heavy Manners” and “The League Of Gentlemen” that lost almost half of the cuts here. With remixed material as Fripp was never content to reissue things without trying to make improvements.
It took me years to to this because of my curator’s sickness. While I had the LP for decades, what I lacked was the “Heptaparaparshinokh” 7″ which contained an 11;45 Frippertronic non-LP B-side, entitled “Marriagemuzic!” Cramming nearly 12 minutes of sound on a 7″ disc meant that, yes, it spun at 33 RPM. Maybe 16 RPM would have been an improvement! It took me until 2013 for me to find a copy of this scarce single, but then only another four years before getting arounf to actually making the CD. The LP was rather clean but the 7″ left a lot to be desired.
Most 7″ singles can sound pretty hairy after 20-40 years, and when this record had nearly enough music for three normal length songs, then something had to give. I had to get more liberal than I cared to be with the noise reduction software on “Marriagemuzic,” but since it was a Frippertronic piece, and not Rock/pop music, there was a certain leeway afforded to my efforts! The NR artifacts jibed with the overall tone of the piece so that I can listen to this without gnashing my teeth in anguish. But that was 2017. In 2022, I have much more sophisticated NR software that makes me wonder if it might be time to “remaster” this title in my unending quest for perfection.
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