TRILOGY

"Trilogy" one of the best known progressive rock masterpieces, and the most popular album of Emerson Lake & Palmer. The album was released at 1972, and the cover art which shows the shirtless Emerson, Lake and Palmer, it was designed by Hipgnosis which designed a lot of prog rock cover arts for bands like: Genesis, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes and more...

The album starts with some heart beats which are created using Palmer's bass drum, with some strange and creepy sound that come right from Emerson's brilliant Moog. It creates a very strange atmosphere especially when the percussion enters along. Greg Lake plays a single note over some Keyboard playing by Keith Emerson, after some pretty heavy part comes a fast break to a quiet verse. "Why do you stare,do you think that I care? you've been misled by the thoughts in your head." is singed quietly by Lake, a drum passage to the chorus "Your words waste and decay nothing you say reaches my ears anyway" gets to a very powerful point especially when Lake is like shouting the words "You never spoke a word of truth!" which gets to an instrumental passage back to the verse.

"Please, please, please open their eyes! please, please, please don't give me lies!" is a very powerful passage back to the verse, the song is structured perfectly and it includes three parts: - The Endless Enigma Part I - Fugue by Keith Emerson - The Endless Enigma Part II

A nice instrumental part gets us to the second part: The "Fugue" which starts with a strange chord then proceeds to a very mellow, emotional music. The bass guitar enters at some stage which sounds a lot like J.S Bach that gets us to the end of the song with some guitar harmonic playing along to the piano.

The third part which is actually the second part of the song starts right after the fugue with some loud piano and drum playing that enters to a Christmas-like bells part of the song along to some moog and bass guitar playing. This is only the passage back to the verse that we already heard before, the fantastic mellow but very powerful verse with some kinda vibrating singing of Greg Lake is exactly what we can expect only from ELP.

"From The Beginning" is the next track, it starts with some acoustic guitar playing, that enters a beautiful verse, it is very soft and acoustic only with some percussion alongside to the singing of Greg Lake, the song became a kind of a hit, at least compared to progressive rock. A very emotional guitar solo that enters a moog solo are getting us to the end of the fantastic piece.

"The Sheriff" starts with some bar-like atmosphere with some conversations that can be quietly heard in the background, at some point you can hear Carl Palmer saying "shit" because he hit the rim of the tom tom. A song about cowboys and the wild west is pretty strange especially for ELP but it still matches the album very good. The song is very melodic with some really wild west atmosphere, some fast honky tonky style piano playing is a very nice end to the song.

"Hoedown" a song by Aaron Copland is a wild west instrumental piece, it is very fast and the beat is very nice and it ends the wild west atmosphere part in this album in a very good way, especially because of the beautiful drums by Carl Palmer which are matching a piece like this perfectly and because of the keyboard and moog playing by Keith Emerson.

The title track is the next one "Trilogy" starts with some classical music atmosphere, it enters a very very beautiful and soft verse with piano only, it creates a dreamy atmosphere which is sad but happy at the same time. The bass guitar enters at some point which is the more fast part of the song that is instrumental and includes Moog, heavy drumming, bass guitar and a keyboard. Greg Lake sings again along to the instrumental part which continues playing, the song ends with some rock n roll styled ending when the band starts playing slower and then hits two chords and breaks.

"Living Sin" starts with a hard rock-like riff and gets to a very low-pitched singing that creates a spooky and heavy atmosphere. The vocal is switched on a regular basis between very low-pitched vocal to some simple Greg Lake singing. The drums in the song are very heavy and are matching the song just perfectly, passage to the end which ends with a break of drums, keyboard, guitar and bass comes next and, well, ends the song.

"Abbadon's Bolero" starts with a camping anthem along to some snare drumming which is played again and again, now played with some bass and on other scale. The whole song starts very quietly and proceeds to a very powerful and heavy point at the end of the song with a lot of instrumental playing, without singing at all, and it all breaks in one pure second that ends this masterpiece album. The whole song is pretty homogeneous and it is just the same riff played again and again at the background along to some building of the strength of the song.

The album reached the fifth place at the Billboard 200 which is a list that shows the 200 best sellers in the United States Of America only, and reached the second place on the UK best selling albums for a while. It was a very successful album, it is very well-though and very well-structured, and in my opinion it is a masterpiece of progressive rock music. The album includes two wild west atmosphere tracks, one hard rock atmospheric song and one drone like song.

I liked the first three tracks the best because I think that they are just brilliant, all of it, the drums, the guitar, the moog, just everything. When I first listened to those three tracks, I couldn't stop listening to it again and again for weeks. The title track created a lot of fun time for me too, and I enjoyed it a lot and listened to it again and again too, but you still can't compare them, at least in my opinion.

I would give this album 99/100 A true masterpiece of progressive rock music.