EMERSON LAKE & PALMER

From the first overdriven fuzz box bass note and organ crunch on this record, you know you are listening to something new and frightening. Emerson's organ has a Jon Lord-like metallic bite, much more aggressive than his work with the Nice, and Lake's bass and Palmer's drums are taking no prisoners. Even the piano sounds pissed off. Bartok's "The Barbarian" is like a tank grinding the musical landscape under its treads, but this is not punk or grunge---this is aggressive music played by virtuosos! (Emerson has said in his autobio that lyrics and tunes were slow to come on their debut album and it sounds like he took his frustrations out on his keys)...This same violent underpinning is there in "Knife Edge", their brilliant take on Janacek's Sinfonietta, the Carl Palmer drum showcase "Tank" and the church organ workout "The Three Fates". In the middle of these tricky songs, a bit of classical piano might break out, followed by a blast of Hammond or a maniacal drum passage.

Even the piano middle section in Lake's beautiful ballad "Take A Pebble" (among the best songs he did with the band) has a driven quality. This is not Rick Wakeman's tastefully-elegant baroque piano---much as I love it as well---but keyboard-as-machine-gun. Having said that, it still retains it's beauty and the opening and closing passages are almost gentle and fragile, compared to the rest of the album. "Take A Pebble" is a song that sounds almost like a bridge between classic ELP and early King Crimson---it has that meandering Lake acoustic guitar solo in the middle that reminds me of Crimso's jazzy, meandering side (no surprise, as Lake had just come from that group). The last song, the classic hit "Lucky Man", sounds out of place on this album, a folk song among classical organ and piano work-outs, but it is possessed of a magnificent opulence, as Lake adds on multi-tracked choir vocals on the choruses, guitar solos, and that classic Keith-playing-with-the-Moog-glide-control synthesizer solo on the outro, a howl that fades into a low frequency whistle that fades into an electronic hiss. Palmer's echo-ing drums ride out the end to a masterful FM radio hit that announced to the world that there was this strange-sounding new band, ELP!

Their debut album was truly the work of a prog rock supergroup...there hadn't been a union of a top-notch keyboardist, very good bass player with a soaring, majestic voice, and top-notch drummer like this in a power trio format like this before. Groundbreaking work in my opinion. The only reason I don't give this one 5 stars is I am reserving that for Brain Salad Surgery...