TARKUS

''Emerson, Lake & Palmer'' was a marvelous and quite succesful debut for E.L.P., what though really established the trio as one of the most iconic Progressive Rock bands of the time was their brilliant performance at the legendary Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.With a heavier dose of ambition E.L.P. moved on to the recordings of a second, more complex album in January 1971.''Tarkus'' was recorded at the Advision Studios in London, featuring the paintings of graphic designer William Neal and dealing with the evolution theory in reverse.It was released a few months later on Island.

The eponymous 20-min. track, recorded in just four days, was the first attempt of the band to create a long and multi-part composition with lots of complicated themes and shifting moods.It is a great piece of music, quite tight and carefully structured, split in seven movements, really one of the milestone compositions of keyboard-based Progressive Rock.It is filled with Keith Emerson's frenetic and adventurous keyboard work with dominant Hammond organ pyrotechnics, often duplicated by his symphonic moog synthesizers, while the smoother and low-tempo moments have still an early KING CRIMSON aura, maybe because of Greg Lake's sensitive singing lines.However the band definitely moved away from the deeply Classical roots of THE NICE and had now fully established a virtuosic style of Symphonic Rock with impressive and unexpected changes.

The flipside of the album is pretty pleasant, but certainly not on the same level of the grand opening opus.It contains six very short tracks, often sounding a bit in the commercial side of Progressive Rock with ''A Time and a Place'' having a strong DEEP PURPLE influence on the Hammond organ work, while ''Are You Ready Eddy?'' is 100% Rock'n'Roll and ''Jeremy Bender'' has evident Pop/Psych influences despite Emerson's lovely piano work.The rest of the tracks are quite good and fairly based on E.L.P.'s established style of bombastic organ-driven Progressive Rock with powerful drumming by Palmer, nice, dramatic vocals by Lake and of course Emerson dual keyboard/piano exercises in full display, with even some grandiose Church organ appearing in ''The Only Way''.

To my ears the debut of E.LP. sounds more consistent with no weak moments.''Tarkus'' is highlighted by the very good eponymous epic, but the rather uneven second side leaves much to be desired.Still it remains a very good album, among the strongest releases of the time...3.5 stars.