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TARKUSEmerson Lake & PalmerSymphonic Prog4.07 | 2152 ratings |
From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website
| arunalu like |
Tarkus is a good album because of one thing: the title track. This sprawling composition with an avant-garde sound
overshadows all the other tracks of the album, and they simply feel optional to listen to after this. In short, I haven't
listened to the album completely more than once. I listen to the title track and that's it.
Compared to this masterpiece of a composition, the other songs simply feel like filler tracks, as no doubt others
have said before. It isn't to say that these other tracks are bad, they're not. However, they feel like simple,
mainstream classic rock songs for the most part. In this way, they feel almost out of place when included in an
album with a track like Tarkus, which is really its most important part; the album is named after it.
Because this album only has one truly impressive, masterful track, and because the other might as well not have
been included here, this album cannot be called a masterpiece. The song Tarkus is arguably one of the greatest pieces of progressive rock ever composed. At first, it feels more complicated and leaning into the avant-garde genre than other long, sprawling progressive rock ballads. For this reason, it may not be as accessible as some other progressive rock songs are, especially to people who are new to the genre. ELP always did make music that was edgy and even a bit pretentious. While some may say that it's a bad thing, I feel like that "pretentiousness" only serves this record, not hinder it. With Tarkus, they composed something truly amazing and that's - at least partly - thanks to their will to go beyond what's accepted, even in progressive rock. An amazing showcase of first-rate synthesizer-playing and outstanding lyrics, Tarkus will probably remain in my top 5 progressive rock songs list for a long time to come. Therefore, Tarkus still remains an essential record in progressive rock because of the title track alone, but that's about the end of the album's magnificence.
arunalu |
4/5 |
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