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**King Crimson - VROOOM VROOOM**
★★★★☆

By 1994, Robert Fripp had already killed King Crimson twice, resurrecting the beast each time with a completely different sonic DNA. The third coming arrived with all the subtlety of a metallic sledgehammer to the cranium, christened with the wonderfully onomatopoeic title VROOOM VROOOM - a name that sounds like what happens when you feed a Marshall stack nothing but Red Bull and existential dread for six months.

This wasn't just another King Crimson reformation; it was Fripp's most audacious gambit yet. Having spent the late '80s exploring ambient soundscapes and guitar craft, he'd assembled what can only be described as a rhythm section from Mars: Trey Gunn wielding his touch guitar like some sort of stringed weapon of mass destruction, Pat Mastelotto behind the kit with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker having a nervous breakdown, and Tony Levin anchoring it all with his Chapman Stick, looking for all the world like a man who'd accidentally wandered into a science fiction film and decided to stay for the chaos.

The album opens with "VROOOM," a seven-minute exercise in controlled demolition that sounds like the 21st century arriving three years early and extremely angry about it. Fripp's guitar doesn't so much play melodies as carve them from solid granite, while the rhythm section locks into grooves so tight they could probably survive re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. It's progressive rock, but not as your dad knew it - this is prog that's been to the gym, learned mixed martial arts, and developed a serious caffeine addiction.

"Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream" follows with a title that reads like a caveman's to-do list but sounds like industrial machinery achieving consciousness and deciding to write poetry. The track showcases the double-trio lineup's most devastating weapon: their ability to make complexity sound inevitable. What should be mathematically impossible time signatures flow like water, albeit water that's been superheated and shot through a particle accelerator.

The real revelation here is how this incarnation manages to be both the heaviest and most precise King Crimson had ever sounded. "Cage" demonstrates this perfectly, building from whispered menace to full-scale sonic warfare with the patience of a master strategist. Mastelotto's drumming doesn't just keep time; it reshapes it, turning rhythm into architecture. Meanwhile, Gunn and Levin create bass frequencies that don't just enter your ears - they relocate your internal organs.

"THRAK" itself stands as perhaps the album's finest moment, a composition that sounds like it was beamed directly from some parallel universe where metal and progressive rock had a baby and raised it on a strict diet of Robert Fripp guitar exercises. The interplay between all six musicians (this was recorded as a double trio, with Bill Bruford also contributing percussion) creates a sonic density that's almost architectural in its ambition.

What makes VROOOM VROOOM particularly fascinating is how it bridges King Crimson's past and future. Echoes of "Red" era brutality mingle with hints of the ambient explorations that would dominate their later work. It's an album that sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic, like discovering cave paintings that happen to predict the internet.

The production, handled by the band themselves, captures every nuance of this controlled chaos. Nothing is buried in the mix; instead, each element occupies its own carefully carved sonic space, allowing the listener to follow individual threads through the labyrinth or simply surrender to the overall assault.

Nearly three decades later, VROOOM VROOOM stands as a high-water mark for late-period King Crimson, proof that Fripp's vision could evolve without losing its essential alienness. It influenced a generation of progressive metal bands who are still trying to figure out how six humans can sound like one extremely sophisticated machine having an emotional breakdown.

This is music for people who find regular rock music insufficiently challenging, who want their entertainment to require active participation from their nervous system. It's King Crimson at their most accessible and their most forbidding - a paradox that only makes sense once you've surrendered to the VROOOM.

Essential listening for anyone who believes music should occasionally feel like a benevolent form of assault.