WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS

*This* is how live albums should be done. "Welcome Back..." captures ELP at the height of their career, having just released Brain Salad Surgery. Therefore it's not surprise that this album contains an almost perfect ELP set list, without any more recent songs dragging it down.

One of the best things about this live album is the fact that none of the songs are just dull renditions of their studio counterparts. Only a few tracks remain unchanged from the normal versions, and they are still improved by the live setting - all the instruments sound better, the whole thing is mixed well, not to mention the fact that a lot of the songs are longer. Tarkus has exploded up to 27 minutes, with an extended keyboard-solo-crazay-thing towards the end. Karn Evil 9 gets a drum solo, and Take A Pebble becomes a behemoth, with a solo acoustic performance and a brilliant piano improvisation section in the middle.

Does this make the songs more difficult to get into? Yes, it certainly does, so this isn't for the casual ELP fan (if any of them exist), but anybody who has heard the original versions of these brilliant songs will be blown away. Maybe you'd find the blown up live versions of these songs too tedious, but personally playing live is all about making everything bigger and better than it was in the studio, and this album does exactly that.