Beat

I’m prepared to argue that the three albums King Crimson made in the early 1980s, when the band included guitarist/singer Adrian Belew, bassist Tony Levin, and drummer Bill Bruford in addition to guitarist/leader Robert Fripp, are the best work of the group’s decades-long career. While Beat doesn’t achieve quite the conceptual complexity and clockwork intricacy of Discipline, it makes up for that with soaring hooks: the yearning “Heartbeat” and “Two Hands,” the exalted “Waiting Man.” And “Sartori in Tangier” is a blissfully lovely instrumental.