Emerson Lake & Palmer Albums

I hate being on a different page from fellow prog fans, but I have to respectfully disagree with the sentiments about Trilogy to be true to my opinion. While I did really like it at first, it lost its luster within a year of me buying it, and now it's very much a mediocre album that constitutes background listening for me. The other three studio albums from that time yielded so much more long-term reward for me. Not a bad starting place, though, as there are still some nice qualities that everyone can objectively appreciate while piquing one's interest for more.

I worked my way backwards chronologically when getting introduced to them, so BSS was my introduction and I maintain either it or Trilogy are the best places to start. Doing it that way, I came to their first one after the others, which for me was a true case of saving the best for last. Best by a wide margin.

 Huh, interesting. What stood out to me about it so much when I first heard it was that it was so much darker and a lot more dense than the others. Maybe that's what drew me to it. Aside from the song Tarkus itself, most of the material has fallen by the wayside over the years, but with that being said, I still consider myself a fan as the material that has stuck with me I really do love. And as different as the first is from the others, I still consider it an integral part of their discography as the tracks on there are pretty fantastic and show off their characteristic sound in distinctive ways, both collectively and individually.

Tarkus is in my top 10 favorite songs ever and likely will be for quite some time barring some wild discovery of enough tracks I haven't heard yet that my list gets dramatically restructured.  

^I agree with a lot of those points. BSS is the only other full album I still appreciate because it demonstrates a balance between a strong group and individual talent shining through at appropriate moments. My second-favorite of theirs for sure and the one I've been listening to the longest. It picked up a bit of the edge that they lost on Trilogy, but not to the level of their first.

Snow Dog wrote: Moogtron III wrote: Snow Dog wrote: I never, ever considered their first to be their best. More of an album for non ELP fans. I disagree with the latter statement. I like ELP for many, many years and I still like the first album a lot. In general i see most people say they like the first album and nothing after that. So are you saying they never improved? That is quite sad for me to hear.

Because of Tarkus and Karn Evil 9, I'd say they definitely still had a lot to offer. They just stopped releasing entire albums worth of strong material in my opinion. It's all subjective in the end, as all these discussions are, so whether or not I believe album-wise it was only downhill after their first one shouldn't affect another's perception of the band. I'm still a fan, as I said before, after they stopped reproducing the dark bombast and gothic textures of the first album and Tarkus, my interest waned.

^I like that observation. Flaws are bound to pop up in any performance, but the fact that they seemed not to care so much about them made them a really organic outfit.

Toccata is a good example of dark bombast too. To me its atmosphere is very reminiscent of the first album, but the sonic textures are notably different, more appropriate to the later part of that generation.