Emerson Lake & Palmer Albums

I think you can't go wrong with starting with one of these four: ELP, Tarkus, Trilogy and Brain Salad Surgery.

C'mon people, that first album is excellent if you only count The Barbarian and Knife-Edge.  Take A Pebble is a pretty good song, especially live.  Lucky Man, Three Fates, Tank, not so good.  But it's a nice intro to the group (and for that matter all prog in general) because it is full of jaw-dropping music, overly ornate music, and just stuff listeners eventually came to detest about prog.  Personally to the newcomer I'd recommend Tarkus, but ELP has at least a little to make it worth recognition.  Hell, warts and all, it's better than any Moodies album.

Such different albums and a joy just to see how far they took things in a year.  The first is completely brilliant and Tarkus, well, it doesn't get much better.   The second side is notoriously patchy and those notorieties would be wrong: it rocks hard, 'Eddy' being the only clunker (and it's a spoof anyway)

And so the answer is of course both.

^ I agree with most of this but for me, Brain Salad Surgery is their one true bona fide 5 star album, and perhaps the greatest Symphonic Progressive rock record released to date. What's interesting about ELP is how they came 'full circle' from the début to Works Volume 1 where the same problems that manifest themselves at the outset came to be their undoing at the end i.e. the 1st album has 3 solo pieces included to appease their individual creators (Three Fates, Tank* and Lucky Man) while Works Vol 1 has an entire side devoted to each band member.


*credited to Palmer but Emerson wrote it

I would go  with Tarkus, but it's a touch choice, better spend a little more for a lot more with this essential compilation that got everything you need :

1) EL&P

BSS is not ELP's top, Tarkus and Trilogy are.....

silverpot wrote: jean-marie wrote: BSS is not ELP's top, Tarkus and Trilogy are..... That's my opinion too.        Fell good to be with the family

Oh dear ,so many opinions and so little objectivity.Jammun gets my vote for the only remotely useful post that actually allows the listener to have an opinion. People who say this or that must be the best are just not helping. ELP were a sometimes inspired mostly inconsistent band who were less focused than other bands of the time. But they were not capable of producing rubbish in that early seventies period (1970 - 1974). The first four studio albums are all available at a reasonable price. Get all of them,listen to them and make a compilation from them of your favourite tracks.Sorted.

Edited by richardh - July 18 2011 at 10:57

Slaughternalia wrote: Actually come to think of it f**k the studio albums. Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends is all you'll need by ELP. they play WAY better on that then any studio album IMO. Plus it has pretty much all their best stuff