ILLUSIONS ON A DOUBLE DIMPLE

Triumvirat's second album is a refinement of the ELP mimicry of their first, with some improvements; Jurgen Fritz is no longer trying to sing like Greg Lake and play like Keith Emerson, and the band as a whole are no longer quite so heavily reliant on their homage to ELP as they were on Mediterranean Tales. In fact, the album shows a broad range of influences - backing singers a la The Dark Side of the Moon - as well as some strikingly original parts, like the bit in Mister Ten Percent where Fritz stops playing and lets the guitar and drums carry the music for a while, a move which Keith Emerson wouldn't have been able to sit still for without physical restraint. Having paid tribute to their heroes on Mediterranean Tales, Triumvirat here made an album that's better than ELP's own output in 1973 - the two epic tracks that make up the album even hang together as coherent compositions better than Karn Evil 9 does. At the same time, it's sufficiently rooted in the ELP style that if you aren't particularly fond of progressive rock in an Emersonian vein you may find it wears thin after a while.