EMERSON, LAKE & POWELL: EMERSON, LAKE & POWELL

Dissapointing. Cozy Powell clearly needed money and Emmerson and Lake clearly needed to get an album out - maybe for contractual reasons. So whats wrong with it? The musicianship? No. Keith Emmerson is unlikely to play like a baboon! Cozy Powell drums like a gorilla banging a wheelybin with mallets as usual, but you have to expect that. Its the collage of crap ideas, and comical pomposity that makes this album almost unlisternable. 'The score' starts positive enough. It sounds exciting then all of a sudden Emmerson breaks into the most awful and innapropriate fake trumpet riff. It ceases to be 'rock music' at that point, IMO, at least until Greg Lake rescues the day with the first verse, about two days into the song. In all fairness 'The score' is probably the best tune on the album, followed by 'The Miracle' and 'Touch and go' the latter which was a single, which went rather unfairly, I felt, ignored by the British record buying public. Pompous though it was it was dead catchy!

The good news stops there. 'Learning how to fly' sounds like Dido at half speed. You can almost hear how bored Greg Lake is as he yawns his way through this mundane, characterless piece of muzak. The rest of the album is plain boring. Then you get 'Mars the bringer of War' Gustav Holst starts to breakdance in his grave as this ponderous trio tear his classic music to bits with synthetic pings, and fake orchestral boings! Then the crowing sh!t on the dung heap has to be 'Loco-motion' Yes, thats right it is THE 'Loco-motion' Done ELP style. Imagine it. Painful.

This is for ELP fans only, and I would imagine plenty of them must have felt somewhere between heartbroken and greatly amused at it.