BLACK MOON

An improvement over the disaster that was To The Power Of Three, but that's like saying cat poop is less of a chore to clean up than dog poop. This time, it's an actual ELP reunion: Emerson, Lake & Palmer are all back together on the same record, but any hopes you might have of seeing their actual talents fully restored on here are immediately squashed once you lay your ears upon the opening track, "Black Moon", which is cursed by exactly the kind of primitive drum rhythm you'd expect on To The Power Of Three; why did they even bother to bring back Carl if all they were gonna have him do is churn out these dreadful monotonous beats that could be played by a four-year-old? You have one of the best prog drummers at your beck and call, and this is all you use him for?. The biggest disappointment however is that the band's signature voice is still absent. Greg Lake himself is back, but this isn't the Greg Lake we came to know and love. In just six years since the recording of Emerson, Lake & Powell, the soothing voice of the illustrious troubadour has been replaced by the not so soothing voice of an aging cigarette victim. The man's colour and range have disappeared, and while his singing on this album doesn't necessarily sound bad in and of itself, one of the main staples of ELP's sound is now irretrievably gone.

The title track itself is supposed to be a bombastic album opener in the old tradition, but this ain't no "Jerusalem". This ain't even no "Endless Enigma". It's the kind of 'grand epic' attention-grabber (complete with an obnoxious "We Will Rock You" drum pattern) that really has nothing to say outside of that, and so the effort can't help but be pathetically undercut by the primitive melody and by the relentless monotony of it all. It's just a loud load of nothing.

From then on, it's just a bunch of toothless rockers interchanged by a bunch of painfully middle-of-the-road ballads. The only song on the album that shows even a wee bit of energy is "Paper Blood", a moderately catchy hard rock tune that sounds more like Deep Purple than Emerson, Lake & Palmer (especially with Greg brandishing a harmonica and Keith pulling out his old trusted organ for once). In fact, all of the vocal songs are straight-forward pop/rock tracks so the only songs that are truly evocative of the classic ELP sound are the album's three instrumentals. Among these is a cover of Prokofiev's famous "Dance Of The Knights" from "Romeo & Juliet", which is a very well-known composition, but they don't really do anything interesting with it so it just sort of plods along accompanied by the same boring electronic drums that pound on throughout the whole record. I see now why Keith was hesitant to take a stab at "Mars, The Bringer Of War" six years earlier. If you're going to adapt such a well-known piece into a rock context, you had better make sure that it lends itself well to it and that you add something to it. Sure, Keith tries pulling off a synth solo at one point but he doesn't go all out the way he used to so it all just sounds a bit stale. Somehow his heart just doesn't seem to have been into the project anymore because he sounds pretty restrained throughout the whole album. He certainly delivers no edge-of-the-seat material on the other two instrumentals either: both the synth anthem "Changing States" and the solo piano piece "Close To Home" are sappy piles of fluff that rank among the man's least interesting compositions.

The numerous pieces of Lake-penned new age muzak like "Affairs Of The Heart" and "Footprints In The Snow" on the other hand are a total disgrace to the ELP brand. On most of these tracks Keith is relegated completely to the background, handing the spotlight to Lake who does little more than some primitive acoustic guitar strumming. But even when the synthesizer does come to the forefront, as it does in "Farewell To Arms", it just ends up sounding like a clichéd motivational Celtic anthem. Ugh, no thanks.