Islands is the strangest, gentlest and most divisive album of King Crimson’s first era — drifting between chamber music, avant-garde jazz and one blazing instrumental that points straight at their future. Released in 1971, it was the only record made by this line-up, and the last with lyricist Peter Sinfield.

The short version

Islands (1971) is the fourth studio album by King Crimson, recorded at Command Studios and produced by the band. Robert Fripp is joined by saxophonist and flautist Mel Collins, singer-bassist Boz Burrell, drummer Ian Wallace and lyricist Peter Sinfield, with guests from the London jazz scene including pianist Keith Tippett. Of the five, only Fripp would remain by the next album. It reached number 30 in Britain, and its highlight is the ferocious ‘Sailor’s Tale.’

A band assembled and dissolved

King Crimson had become a revolving door. For this record Fripp gathered a new group around Mel Collins, whose saxophone and flute give the album its voice, and hired Boz Burrell to sing. Burrell was not a bassist — Fripp taught him the instrument, and he learned it well enough to become, a few years later, a founder member of Bad Company. Ian Wallace drummed, and would go on to play with Bob Dylan. Several guests came from the orchestral jazz collective Centipede, whose album Fripp had recently produced. It did not last. Fripp dismissed Peter Sinfield after the album, citing eighteen months of mounting hostility; Sinfield thought creative friction was the point. The rest of the band left the following year.

The sound

This is the quietest and most exploratory Crimson album of the period, and the jazziest. Mel Collins’s reeds float and snarl; Keith Tippett’s piano scatters notes across the mix; oboe, cornet and double bass drift in from the world of chamber music, and a soprano voice keens wordlessly over the opening track. Fripp alternates delicate acoustic textures with sudden, biting electric guitar. Some passages hang together beautifully and others simply hang, drifting where earlier albums drove. Its admirers call it the most overlooked gem in the catalogue; its detractors call it aimless. Both are listening to the same record.

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The songs

‘Formentera Lady’ opens on double bass, flute and piano, warm and eastern-tinged, before dissolving into a wordless soprano vocal that divides listeners at a stroke. It flows straight into ‘Sailor’s Tale,’ the album’s triumph: Ian Wallace’s insistent cymbal, Mel Collins’s acerbic saxophone, and a spiky, metallic guitar figure from Fripp that points directly at Larks’ Tongues in Aspic. ‘The Letters’ is gothic melodrama, ‘Ladies of the Road’ a raucous, ribald blues about touring life, and ‘Prelude: Song of the Gulls’ a stately chamber miniature. The title track closes in yearning cornet and oboe.

Reception and legacy

Opinion has always been split. AllMusic calls Islands the weakest studio album of Crimson’s first era, while conceding that it disappoints only beside extraordinary predecessors; All About Jazz hears a well-conceived, superbly executed and perfectly sequenced record. Robert Christgau was dismissive. Two details have entered legend: the British sleeve, a photograph of the Trifid Nebula bearing no text at all, front or back, where American buyers instead got Sinfield’s own painting of little islands; and the hidden track, in which a minute of silence gives way to studio chatter and Fripp calmly instructing his players. Since 2014 that recording has been the band’s walk-on music.

The verdict

Islands is not the place to begin — In the Court of the Crimson King and Red come first — and it is the least immediate album of Crimson’s early years. But approached patiently, as a quiet, jazz-inflected chamber record rather than a rock album, it offers real rewards, and it grows with acquaintance as few of their records do. Come for the blistering ‘Sailor’s Tale,’ stay for the strange, drifting beauty of the title track, and hear a band dissolving even as they made something nobody else could have.

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