CARL PALMER'S PM: 1 PM

For his first venture into solo album territory Carl Palmer, like Greg Lake, formed a band. Unlike Lake however, Palmer decided to be more democratic, and did not simply use his own name for the band, preferring to adopt the name PM. In fairness, Lake's solo albums were easily identified through his instantly recognisable voice, whereas Palmer remains firmly behind the drum stool here.

"1PM" turned out to be the only album released by PM. It should be seen as a precursor to Palmer's involvement with Asia, rather than a side project of Emerson Lake and Palmer. The music is firmly rooted in the punk pop environment of the early 80's, the longest of the 10 tracks clocking in at a mere four minutes. The Asia comparisons are therefore in themselves rather misleading, as the music here does not generally have the refined quality which was the hallmark of Asia's sound. The new wave influences of the period come through throughout the album. Tracks such as the opening "Dynamite" and the following "You've got me rockin'" might be described as the BOOMTOWN RATS meet UTOPIA in their later days.

"Green velvet splendour" finds keyboard player Todd Cochran doing a reasonable impression of TALKING HEADS, but despite a fair synthesiser run things are deteriorating rapidly. They plummet to their worst with the pathetic lyrics of "Do you go all the way". The song is apparently intended to be tongue in cheek, but it misfires badly.

While the song-writing credits are spread reasonably democratically throughout the rest of the band, Carl is conspicuously absent from them throughout. The simple nature of the songs render the drum contributions perfunctory; there really is no need for someone of Carl's ability to be involved. A trained monkey could have picked up the basic rhythms in half an hour.

Just how much influence and involvement Carl had in this project, other than blessing it with his name and some rudimentary drumming, is a matter for conjecture. At the end of the day though, the album lacks any appeal whatsoever, and fails to offer anything remotely of interest.

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