TRILOGY

Despite the attractions of "Karn Evil 9", this remains my favourite ELP album. Kicking off with "Endless Enigma" (my favourite ELP track), it fades in gently with synth over a bass drum "heartbeat", before an eastern sounding synth leads into the organ intro. This song features some of Greg Lake's best singing and some great drum work from Carl Palmer. The beautiful piano fugue splits up the two sections of this song. "In the beginning" is a Greg Lake song, some nice acoustic guitar and Emerson chips in a solo at the end. "The Sheriff" has been called an ELP "joke" song, similar to Benny the Bouncer etc, but I've never really thought of it as such. It's an excellent song and I love the Western-style piano ending. "Hoedown" is the opening track from "Welcome Back My Friends" (although played at 100mph on that album) and is an Aaron Copeland instrumental.

It should come as no surprise that the brilliant title track is in three parts. Starting off with a nice piano section with more excellent vocal work, it leads into a manic synth section, followed by a final vocal section. "Living Sin" is probably the weakest number here, although at least Greg Lake shows he can hit the low notes as well as the high ones. "Abaddon's Bolero" is an instrumental consisting of a repeated keyboard riff, which builds up and adds more keyboards as the song progresses. It has been called repetitive but that is the whole point of the song.

Overall I find this their most consistent album, the production (by "are you ready" Eddie Offord) is also the best I have heard on an ELP album. Only "Living Sin" stops it getting a fifth star.