TRILOGY

Vastly more consistent than Tarkus, but lacking a song that quite reaches the height of that album's famed epic of war and space armadillos, Trilogy used to be my favourite of the two because, like the debut, it's an Emerson Lake and Palmer album I can listen to from beginning to end. At the same time, to do so I do find I have to sit through some of the bad habits the band were developing that would come to fruition on Brain Salad Surgery. The vocal sections of some tracks, such as on The Endless Enigma, add little beyond pushing the bombastic material from grandeur into farce, and it would have been better had Greg restricted his singing to pieces such as From the Beginning, which seems to have been written with vocals in mind from the start. The novelty track on here, The Sheriff, isn't quite as goofy as Jeremy Bender or Benny the Bouncer, but it still becomes irritating after a while.

Another downside to this album is Emerson's keyboard sound. We all know Keith loved to incorporate as many new and innovative synthesisers onto ELP albums as possible, and I suspect most prog fans wouldn't have it any other way; however, I think a few of the synths and keys deployed on here were not quite ready for primetime - either in terms of the hardware, or simply in terms of people figuring out how to make them sound good. There's points where the synthesiser sound on the album has aged badly - this is most notable in some sections of Abbadon's Bolero, where some of the synths sound like cheesy 80s Casio keyboards mimicing old Dr Who incidental music. Of course, at the time it must have sounded revolutionary... but listening to it 40 years after the fact, it gets pretty cheesy.

Still, like I said this is the most consistent album ELP managed to do after their debut, so three and a half stars.