THE BEST OF EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER

Yes. I agree with some of the previous reviewers of this album: it is not easy to make compilations from Prog Rock bands that recorded long pieces of music like EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER, YES and others. But I think that in 1980, the year that this "The Best of ELP" album was released, their record label (or labels?), with the band having split after the recording of the "Love Beach" album (which was more of a "Contract Obligation Album", as the band really wanted to split before having to record that album in 1978) still wanted to earn more money from some Prog bands like ELP. The record label, apart from "Love Beach", still released a live album in late 1979 called "In Concert" and this compilation was released a year later. Maybe these two post-split album releases were also "Contract Obligation Albums". I really don`t know.

Now, about the material included in this compilation:

Some of the musical pieces are not very Prog Rock songs, like "Lucky Man" and "Still... You Turn Me On" (both were very popular acoustic guitar ballads composed by Lake), "Peter Gunn" (composed by Heny Mancini and taken from the "In Concert" album, I think that the band played this song more as a joke to open their concerts during their last tours in the seventies) and "Tiger in a Spotlight" (a Rock and Roll song played with keyboards). The rest of the songs are more Prog Rock in style, so many fans from this band could be angry to find two of them in edited form ("Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Karn Evil (1st Impression - Part 2)" ). Yes, it was hard to make a compilation like this to please ELP fans, so I think that this album was released more for the casual listener or the new listener who wanted then to knew this band. But it is not a very good compilation for beginners, so...this album is not a very good representative of the Prog Rock music that this band created.

I think that this compilation is out of print, but maybe I`m wrong, but there is another album also titled "The Best of ELP" released in 1994 by other label with different cover art and tracks listing. It is better than this 1980 compilation, in my opinion.