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101 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb sonic upgrade for an oft-overlooked gem., June 6, 2006
The late 1970s was a period of reinvigoration and rediscovery for Robert Fripp-- in 1974, after dissolving King Crimson, Fripp withdrew from the music industry only to be drawn back a couple years later working with Peter Gabriel and the David Bowie/Brian Eno partnership. A relocation to New York and musical reawakening due to the punk and new wave scenes burgeoning there led to the recording of "Exposure", Fripp's first and only "proper solo album" (his words, not mine).
Drawing on an unusual list of collaborators-- vocalists Daryl Hall (of Hall & oates), Terre Roche (the Roches), Peter Hammill (Van der Graf Generator) and Peter Gabriel with instrumental contributions by Tony Levin on bass, Barry Andrews (XTC, Shriekback) on organ, session man Sid McGinnis on guitar and drum contributions by Jerry Marrotta, Phil Collins (back when he was a drummer) and Narada Michael Walden, Fripp ends up with a pretty unusual stew. The music is like King crimson dragged through a New York filter-- post-punk, new wave, progressive rock, art rock and others all come filtering through. Commercial considerations limited some contributions-- Daryl Hall's label forced Fripp to remove some of his contributions for fear association with Fripp would damage his marketability (Hall's first solo album, "Sacred Songs", produced by Fripp, was also delayed several years by the label for the same reason) and a cover of "I Feel Love" featuring Blondie was stopped by their label, again for commercial concerns, but nonetheless "Exposure" works out to be one of those startlingly diverse and undatable albums.
From the start, this is an odd affair-- the first song (after an odd preface) finds Fripp, Hall (on piano), Levin and Walden sinking in to a punky almost stride groove on "You Burn Me Up I'm a Cigarette", with Hall's uncharacteristically aggressive vocal soaring over the fierce backing track. But the album doesn't embrace this sound for long, moving between Crimson-esque instrumentals ("Breathless" and "Haaden Two", both with the sort of monsterous riffing that made Fripp's reptuation), explosive art rock pieces (rambling "Disengage", featuring a shouted, ranting vocal from Hammill, Roche and Hammill duetting over Fripp's pounding riffing on "I May Not Have Had Enough of Me But I've Had Enough of You"), an oddly venemous love ballad (swinging "Chicago", check Hammill's bizarrely tortured vocal) to simply lovely and beautiful balladry (the delicate clean-tone guitar driven "Mary", ably sung by Roche and what to my mind is the definitive version of Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood", with Gabriel's plaintive vocal backed by his piano and Frippertronics).
The problem is with an album this startlingly diverse and quite unlike so many other things Fripp's been involved in, it's highly likely that people who love Fripp's music may find this unlistenable. But one of the things I love about "Exposure" is that in its diversity, it provides a number of opportunities for finding new things on repeated listens, and it really is a magnificent album.
This reissue is quite a package-- it presents the album as it was originally released (or close to at least), soemthing that hasn't been done ever on CD, it also includes a second disc close to the CD mix, but restoring all of the Daryl Hall vocals that were forcibly removed. Intriguingly, one is painted a drastically different picture of Hall than you'd get without this, and one wonders what direction his career would have ended up in had this been issued intact-- his vocal on "Disengage" is a piece of fierce energy that belies description. Additionally, a handful of bonus tracks, alternates from the sessions, etc. are included (although the Fripp/Blondie track never surfaced).
Sonically, the upgrade is fantastic-- I always thought the '89 remasters of the Crimson catalog sounded great until I heard the 30th anniverary editions, ditto for this release-- there's a sonic clarity and level of detail that makes this a worthwhile upgrade, and like the Crimson reissues, there's details here you never heard.
The album also includes extensive liner notes, both reproduction of the originals, lyrics and excerpts from Fripp's diary during the remastering process. It makes for a worthwhile lead.
The limited edition release packages this in a mini-LP sleeve-- while I like these, I'm kind of bummed they couldn't find a place to stick the booklet, and as a result, in the packaging it just comes wedged between the gatefolds of the case. The jewel case may have been a better option in this case.
Regardless of packaging, this is an album that has gone overlooked-- Fripp's legacy seems to be largely restricted to King Crimson, but "Exposure" is something no fan of his should overlook. Highly recommended.
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The well rounded World of Robert Fripp, December 8, 2006
What a great compilation! I had read some complaints about the earlier '83 release being remixed and have stuck with the vinyl until now. These discs have the best of all worlds:
'79 original tapes brightened up a bit, but interestingly, not as sonically open as the '83 remix
'83 remix version, which has some negatively noticable differences from the '79 edition:
- "Exposure" remix mutes the rythm section and excises Terry Roche's exclaimation "Hah!" from the end of the song. I guess Robert didn't like the implied triumph over Suffering : )
- "Chicago" has a slightly different vocal take and (again) muted rythm
- "Breathless" alters the Frippertronics and (noticing a trend?) mutes the rythm section. I know RF has long running battles with Rythm musicians, but in these cases I found that less was not more.
All in all, only a few of the songs were "improved" enough for me to prefer the clearer sound of the '83 remix. Beautiful songs that begged for little improvement: "Mary" with a slightly different vocal ending and "Northstar" are stellar and the umpteenth version of Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood" has some of the Frippertronics replaced by a flute and is the best version of the song I've heard.
The 3rd component of this Exposure release is the inclusion of Daryl Hall's original vocals on several songs and a couple of other unmemorable alternate vocal takes by other artists. Hall's take on the song "Exposure" pales in comparison to the looped vocals of the Roche who must have had to have had vocal chord surgery afterwards, and while very good, his version of "Mary" is not quite up to Roche's version. Despite Fripp's angst at Hall's management that denied inclusion of these songs in the '79 release, we can all be thrilled at the resulting brilliance of his choice of Roche as the replacement vocalist for the aforementioned songs.
Finally, there is a fun little booklet with another of Fripp's trademark rants against the horrible state of the music world versus the nirvana that Music 'done the right way' can provide. It's pretty touching, actually, and reminds me a bit of Zappa's heartfelt take that "Music is the Best".
Anyway, if you're at all curious about various forms of music, you'll find quite a few styles represented here all delivered with Fripp's characteristic intensity: powerful, beautiful, tender, haunting, hypnotic, chaotic, paranoic, angry music done right!
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Reissue details & differences here, July 12, 2007
Enough has been written about the importance of this album and how it has stood the test of time. It says something about this listener's growth, at least; when I first heard Exposure in high school, I called it the biggest waste of talent on record, given the roster of musicians playing on it yet the distinctly non-Crimson results. But I wasn't ready for punk rock, I suppose, and Fripp was - hence this stellar effort (as I grew to see it within a couple of years!) that fuses New York avant-garde, punk (in spirit if not in yobbish playing), ambient music, and - yes - even a touch of King Crimson (in the devastating Breathless). And I was too young and uninformed to know anything about the fight between Fripp and RCA record boss Tommy Mottola over Daryl Hall being the main vocalist on the album, with Fripp's loss in this tiny power struggle resulting in Peter Hammill, Terre Roche, and Peter Gabriel sharing the vocal duties.
That said, I'll aim my comments at this reissue. In a nutshell, Fripp does the same thing here that he's done before, producing the same infuriating results: he tampers with the original artifact to reflect his present attitude towards it, instead of just reissuing the recording as first released. I find it as frustrating now as I did when he remixed Exposure in 1985, just the same as with individual discs within the various generations of Crimson reissues, whether earlier, like Islands and Larks' Tongues (where tiny changes produced annoying results) or more recent, like Discipline and Three Of A Perfect Pair (with bonus tracks that marred the spirit of the record in the first case and radically improved it in the second).
The first disc is the original LP mix of Exposure, so that's great; it's now on CD, with all its unique moments restored: the fast fade of Disengage, Terre Roche's dismissive "Hah!" at the end of the title track (which once more ends on "X"), the much longer narrative at the end of Haaden Two (including the wonderfully paradoxical "Both the things weren't true; that's definitely true"), and probably a few more subtle differences I missed the first time around. Putting the various versions side by side, the original mix is thicker and grubbier, but still my favorite. Punk rock, right?
Disc two is where the problems start. Take note - spoiler alert! According to Fripp's informative but typically discursive liner notes, the original idea was to repackage the first remix/reissue (1983 LP, '85 CD) with the unreleased Daryl Hall vocals as bonus tracks. Of course, Fripp then decided to redo things to "create" a version of the album as he'd originally mooted it. This mix, therefore, is basically the 1985 version, but with Hall's lead vocals substituting for all the Peter Hammill vocals except I May Not Have Had Enough of Me and for Terre Roche's vocals on Exposure. Peter Gabriel remains as the voice of Here Comes the Flood and Roche as Mary. The Hammill versions as they appeared on the 83/85 remix are now shunted to the end as extra tracks, except for his take on Chicago, which is dropped entirely, though you get a separate Daryl Hall version of Mary and a duet of Hammill (fine) and Roche (awful, sorry) on Chicago. The labelling of the 1985 mixes as "alternate" is disingenous, to say the least.
So how about those Hall vocals, resurrected after all these years? Frankly, they're not that good. I recognize the punk ethos teeming in the mix and Hall's determined need to shrug off his pop star status and go with the artistic spirit of that remarkable age, and it's well established that Fripp was caught up in it too, which shaped the sessions into this resulting album. But honestly, the tracks aren't comparable to the official release. Chicago works well enough - the blues are the blues, after all, though I still prefer Hammill's menace on the familiar version. And Hammill is simply much better at channeling the fury and edge of 1979; he'd been capable of being a proto-punk screamer (with Bowie and John Lydon on record as endorsing him) well before Hall was even singing Sarah Smile, thus Disengage (with almost entirely new lyrics, possibly improvised and basically rubbish) loses everything in its "new" version. This is not to slight Hall, who's talented, just a bit out of his depth: his take on Mary is fine, though little different in spirit to Roche's, and he does sterling work on the title track -- though still not a patch on Roche's utter nutcase delivery on the original. NY3 (retitled here) is the one real success, but basically it's a different song so can't be compared; it loses its Hells Kitchen found vocal and has proper lyrics sung by Hall over the instrumental track; they're good, and the results are similar in spirit to NY3NY (on Hall's Sacred Songs album), which put new words to "I May Not Have Had Enough Of Me." It's certainly the high point of the Hall material on this record.
My position is this; fans would have been better served if the second disc had been the 1985 remix with the unreleased Hall versions as bonus tracks, but I suppose that's too much the industry way of doing things for Fripp to go along with ultimately, and he had a chance to assemble something close to how he'd envisioned it originally. It's just not as good. Fripp hints at acknowledging that in the liner notes when he observes that Mottola's stubbornness caused the album to take a different direction, with the results as we know them, and that fans can reassemble the familiar album through programming regardless. This assertion isn't true, by the way -- that we can put back together the 1985 album Fripp decided not to reissue here -- because he leaves off the 1985 Hammill version of Chicago, which was a different vocal take to the 1979 mix. Instead we get the unreleased duet, which as I've noted is less than successful; Terre Roche tries her Yoko Ono thing again but this time sounds like she's being strangled on the fade-out. Of course, the irony here is that Fripp was right as much as he was wrong. You get the original version in all its scruffy glory and you can create a version of the 1985 mix if you want (which I've done), but only with the help of the earlier reissue to get what's missing. So there you go!
OK, just a few words on the package. The liner notes are excerpts from his diaries, which explain choices in mixing, etc. but aren't useful for quick reference. The pictures are great, if not always the best quality: newspaper reprints, unused cover concepts, a work-up of some attempted remake of Alphaville with Debbie Harry. The best element is the musician credits; finally, you get a clear list of players for each song. Fans may want to learn that Levin is the bassist throughout (not John Wetton), Phil Collins and Jerry Marrotta drum on a couple of tracks each, and on everything else (Breathless, Disengage, NY3, and I May Not Have Had Enough) is latter-day Mahavishnu Orchestra drummer Narada Michael Walden, which helps explain why Breathless in particular is like some ferocious outtake from Red. And that's Sid McGinniss playing the massive funk riff of Exposure, because Robert just could never do that sort of stuff, could he?
By the way, if you buy the Japanese version, you also get two separate sleeves, just like the LPs (a single one for the 1979 version, a gatefold for 1985), plus a postcard, an OBI, and a Japanese booklet. Very nicely done, in fact.
Another curio fans may want to find, I also have an Italian/Indian (?) re-release of Exposure from 2006 that just preceded the double reissue (VH Records, RFCD 01010202). Its mix is the 1983/85 version and the package is a single-sleeve mini LP, with a redundant booklet that provides in larger type everything on the inner sleeve (also included). Nice for the aging audience who might now wear bifocals. The real gem, though, is a much longer (by nearly 2 minutes!) take on Water Music 2. This is not a merging of 1 and 2, I should stress, but a longer track that show how the familiar version actually fades in about half way though. Nothing radically different, just more loops, but a surprise and a real treat once I figured it out.
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