TRILOGY

After Trilogy, ELP stopped making sense for me. An occasional moment of clarity aside, they just continued re-producing average clones of whatever they had done before, making music devoid of heart and purpose. With Trilogy they made the last album that still makes sense.

The Endless Enigma is a difficult one for me, liked it a lot but it now sounds as if Lake had increasing difficulties to come up with anything decent to sing on top of Emerson's classic flirtations. He sounds like a schoolboy chanting an arena hymn here. Whatever, it's a classic.

And then comes From The Beginning. A beautiful piece of music. Couldn't Lake have come up with this tune one year earlier to spice up side 2 of Tarkus? I'm not much of a fan of 70's synths in rock, but that moog ditty at the end here is simply gorgeous. The Sheriff is a nice ELP filler track. Hoedown doesn't do much for me though. Like all ELP's adaptations it only makes me long for the real thing.

Trilogy is another frustrating ELP experience. The opening minutes are wonderful, great piano playing and adorable singing from Lake, followed by 2 minutes of the most dazzling synth playing of that era. But then, instead of fading out and ending in grace, they deemed it necessary to extend the track with 4 minutes of idiocy, both the synths and the vocals in the second half of this song are far-fetched and rather brash.

Living Sun explores ELP's gothic side, known from tracks like The Barbarian and Knife Edge. It's not equally good as those songs but obviously, these low register vocals can sure please a gothic bat like me. With that song as a reference, Lake could easily have applied for a job with The Sisters of Mercy. Abbandon's Bolero ends the album with 10 minutes of hot air and gives further proof of the pointlessness of ELP's classic adaptations. This is exactly what I mean with disgraceful keyboards in 70's rock.

With a bit calculation, I arrive at some great, some average and some poor minutes of music. I guess that would be spot-on for 3 stars.