Saxon Surprise

I was going through some old mp3s the other day and I stumbled across Saxon doing "Court of the Crimson King." I fully expected it to suck and I think that was a reasonable expectation. Saxon is a decent band, but they're a down-in-the-trenches metal band playing rock in it's most distilled but uneventful form, not an avante garde band who pushes the limits of what rock can be. There was no way they could pull this off. Nonetheless, curiosity (of the train wreck, rubbernecking variety) got the best of me. Surprise of surprises, it was actually a very good cover. It didn't depart tremndously from the original, but it did replace a lot of Robert Fripp's amazing guitar parts with second-rate New Wave of British Heavy Metal leads. This is not a dig though, because it injected the song with a very different energy. It's still pretty dynamic with a lot of pace changes and even the operatic parts, but it replaces some of the trippy psychedelia of the original with hard rock swagger and that makes it worth hearing.