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Emerson Lake & Palmer - Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends CD (album) cover

WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS

Emerson Lake & Palmer

 

Symphonic Prog

4.28 | 644 ratings

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Warthur
Prog Reviewer
5 stars I'm of the opinion that while ELP cut a number of five-star tracks in their time, they never quite managed to produce the five-star studio album they had the potential to create. Their debut album, though a strong effort and perhaps their most consistent work, still finds their sound in the process of coming together and not quite gelling yet. The first side of Tarkus is their greatest ever work, but the second side had patchier quality control - with their tendency towards throwing in dreadful novelty songs beginning to rear its ugly head.

Trilogy was also marred by the comedy songs, whereas Brain Salad Surgery I regard as a bit of a disaster - individual songs and moments on it have grown on me, but as an album, as a cohesive piece of work, it's a mess, a set which captures the band straining in multiple essentially incompatible directions (including novelty tracks again, ugh) and with a hollow pomposity to proceedings which undermined even the better songs (mostly Jerusalem, Toccata and the first and third impressions of Karn Evil 9). In short, it was an album whose fatal flaw, to my ears, is that it lacks a balance point: the band are either mucking about with awful comedy tracks or taking things entirely too seriously without there being any middle ground.

Then, after that, you have Works - a two-album set where most people can find a few tracks they'll enjoy, but almost nobody would claim is perfection through and through - and then, after that, the nightmare landscape of Love Beach and the reunion albums beyond it. But rewind a little to the Brain Salad Surgery era, because whilst I still find the studio album bad as a studio album (though not unlistenably so - I'll put it on specifically when I want to scratch the very particular itch it scratches), we also have ELP's absolute best work in the form of this triple live album.

Like I said, my big problem with Brain Salad Surgery is that, after Tarkus briefly brought the different musical forces at work in ELP and got them pulling together in a distinctive direction on its title track, Brain Salad Surgery has them going at full speed in all different directions. Conversely, Welcome Back My Friends... manages the difficult task of encompassing all the dimensions of ELP whilst, amazingly, making it all work reasonably well together.

Arguably, the triple album format was essential to this; you need the space provided by the format to really let everything ELP bring to the table breathe. Another thing which helps is that the novelty songs are dialed back - they're represented by a medley of Jeremy Bender/The Sheriff, two of the more tolerable songs ELP did this vein, and at that point in the running order it makes a reasonable enough palette cleanser.

The other thing which makes the album work is that the live versions of the material here are absolute corkers. This is especially true of the two epics represented. Karn Evil 9's first and third impressions have an injection of raucous live energy which makes them feel less stilted and plastic than their studio incarnations; even the second impression makes a bit more sense in context, since the improvisations here go to somewhat darker places than the jazzy tinkling of the studio version, and we're already in the context of a live set where ample time elsewhere is set aside for Emerson to improvise on piano so it's less jarring in context. The version of Tarkus, meanwhile, is greatly expanded on the original, with even a detour into King Crimson's Epitaph partway through the story which actually makes a lot of sense in context.

The main downside of the original set was that the grand version of Tarkus presented there got split into two due to the limitations of vinyl sides - but thankfully, this is something the CD age can heal, so I'd actually recommend the quite decent 2CD remasters of the album over the original vinyl release.

Warthur | 5/5 |

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