EMERSON LAKE & PALMER

For many ELP fans, this debut album is their favorite. Its strong point is the piano playing, especially on Take a Pebble. The middle section of highlights a little guitar piece they seems to suggest a guy in the woods finding a guitar. I am sure Rush picked that up for 2112. The Barbarian is a fun piece because of its quoting of Bartok's allegro con barbaro. When his widow found out they had used it, she sued the band. Emo should have kept to ripping off Russian composers who were in the public domain thanks to communism. I like the way the opening bombastic guitar faze creates this silly caricature of an armadillo-like creature; it would have been great for the second album Tarkus. Then this texture dies down and the Bartok that creeps in. There are no words because everybody's tongue was stuck in their respective cheeks.

The album is really like works Vol Nul in the sense that you have one side of the album that is Emerson, Lake and Palmer and a second side that highlights the three players individually. The Three Fates highlights Emerson's piano playing in a pseudo- Messian rip off with some Debussy thrown in for good measure. it's very pretentious and fun. Tank is a fun piece as far as drum solos go. They used to play this on the radio once in a while; imagine that. Carl Palmer is one of the great Brit drummers of the last sixties early seventies. (What happened to all the great drumming.) Then of course we have Lucky Man, penned when Lake was twelve, he reworked it for the album because they needed one piece to fill it out. It's probably Lake's only song that has a chorus and it still gets airplay; imagine that. Lake kept the first take of the moog because he liked the portimento in the opening. Now Emerson says he's expected to play this solo for verbatim.

Overall, the album is an impresssive debut. It shows the distinct personalities of the members that ultimately led to the band's demise. Luckily, they were able to work well together and integrate their individuality to produce some great albums and pieces of the 1970s. Its emphasis on the piano and jazz improvisation are its best moments; but they were often the best moments in ELP.