Three of a Perfect Pair closes King Crimson’s 1980s trilogy by splitting itself in two — a bright, tuneful Left Side and a dark, instrumental Right Side. Released in 1984, it ends with a ferocious revival of ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic,’ and then the band vanished for a decade.

The short version

Three of a Perfect Pair (1984) is the tenth studio album by King Crimson, and the last by the longest-lasting line-up they had yet had: Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin and Bill Bruford. The original record labelled its halves the Left Side and the Right Side, and Fripp described them as the accessible and the excessive aspects of the band’s personality. It contains the club favourite ‘Sleepless’ and the closing ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part III.’

Left side, right side

The sessions for Beat had been unhappy, and it took a genuine repair of the friendship between Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew for this album to exist at all. When it came, the solution was to stop pretending the two halves of the band’s character could be reconciled, and simply give each its own side of the record. The Left Side offers new-wave art-pop with hooks and choruses. The Right Side abandons songs almost entirely for instrumental tone poems that reach toward what would later be called dark ambient and industrial rock. It is a strange, bifurcated album, and the design is deliberate.

The sound

The machinery of the 1980s Crimson is intact. Two guitars interlock in rippling, unequal patterns, Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick and bass supply groove and counter-melody at once, and Bill Bruford moves between acoustic drums and electronic pads with unnerving precision. But the spaces are wider than before, and Fripp favours texture over fretwork. Belew sings with his customary anxious warmth. When the two sides of the record are heard together, the effect is of a band arguing with itself in public, and playing brilliantly throughout.

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The songs

The title track opens with guitar patterns that lock together like an Escher drawing, dizzying and oddly serene. ‘Sleepless’ follows, driven by one of Tony Levin’s most celebrated basslines and Bruford’s cracking timbales; released as a single with dance remixes, it became an unlikely club hit. ‘Man with an Open Heart’ is bright new-wave pop. Then ‘Nuages’ turns the lights out, and ‘Industry’ and ‘No Warning’ unfold as bleak, oppressive soundscapes. ‘Dig Me’ is a beat-poetry ode to an abandoned car, and ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part III’ ends the album in daredevil polyrhythms.

Reception and legacy

Most listeners place it below Discipline and above Beat, and there the argument stalls. The title track, ‘Sleepless’ and ‘Larks’ Tongues Part III’ are widely admired; ‘Model Man’ and ‘No Warning’ less so. AllMusic hears the strain between Fripp and Belew in the writing, each man’s excesses unchecked by the other. Yet the Right Side has aged remarkably: its bleak instrumental landscapes anticipate industrial rock, and it is no coincidence that Belew was later recruited to play on Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. King Crimson disbanded afterwards, and would not enter a studio again for about ten years.

The verdict

Three of a Perfect Pair is not where to meet King Crimson, and it is the third of three — Discipline first, always. But it is a fascinating and often thrilling record, and the boldness of its split personality has worn better than its reputation. Come for the interlocking beauty of the title track and the irresistible pulse of ‘Sleepless,’ stay for the closing fury of ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part III,’ and hear four extraordinary musicians ending an era on their own contradictory terms.

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