EMERSON LAKE & PALMER

The debut album of three non-debutants as this is one of the first supergroups in the prog history. Keith Emerson comes from the Nice and the first track of this album "The Barbarian" clearly demonstrates it "from the beginning". Carl Palmer is the powerful drummer from Atomic Rooster and Gre Lake is the man behind the Crimson's masterpiece 21st Century Schizoid Man.

Can you expect a masterpiece from this band?

Yes, of course.

Reviewing an album of this kind is very hard because finding something that hasn't already been said by somebody else is very uneasy and unlikely to happen.

However after the very "nice" opener, Greg Lake gifts us of his fantastic voice on "Take A Pebble". I'm one of those who think that Lake is one of the greatest singers ever. I think that his voice is the essence of how a prog vocalist should sound and this long song is for me the best of the album and one of the absolutely best songs released by ELP. It contains all the things which have made this band great: a great piano solo, the non-invasive but effective drums and a lot of ideas. Emerson harping directly on the strings of an open grandpiano while Lake plays a 12 strings guitar in an oriental performance that grows into a country-blues piece. An epic track which pays back for the whole album.

"Knife Edge"'s bass line is something that's fixed in my mind since from the 70s. Sometimes these few notes pop up to my mind unexpectedly. Emerson's keyboards has here that sound that will forever be the band's trademark, so what could I ask more to a five minutes song?

Let's switch to Side B (I have the vinyl, of course). The church organ which opens the mini suite "The Three Fates (Atropos, Clotho and Lachesis)" is pompous and dark as a church organ only can be and I think this is the track which gave to some Italian directors the idea of hiring Emerson for horror movie's soundtracks. After the initial organ part, the rest of the track is mainly based on piano as Emerson only can play it. I don't want to enter in the polemics about who's the best player between Emerson and Wakeman. I like both and they are just similar but different. This is another track that I love.

"Tank" became famous in my country because it was used as end title track of a weekly TV magazine. It started from the last minutes of the drum solo until the end, but it was the version taken from Works. Here it's still one of the most famous ELP songs and on the album is followed by the radio-friendly one: Lucky Man.

I loved that song but as all the radio-friendly things, I've got a bit tired of it during the years. What I still love of this song is the final keyboard riff that's not so much radio-friendly.

The only "bad" thing of this album is the presence of very low volume parts, specially on take A Pebble (but even the following albums will have silences and low volume moments). This is a problem when you pretend to listen to the album while driving. It requires headphones and finding the right way to listen to this album was not easy neither cheap in the early 70s.

However this is a masterpiece and I still listen to this ELP album (and not to this one only) even after 40 years.