THE THOUGHTS OF EMERLIST DAVJACK

This is the album with which Keith Emerson earned his stripes - even if the band's subsequent albums had all fallen apart, there's enough obvious potential here that he'd have always landed on his two feet whatever happened, and arguably once David O'List left the group after this album and they reconfigured to the power trio format the remaining Nice material is essentially a dry run for ELP, without the benefit of a Greg Lake-tier bassist or a Carl Palmer-tier drummer in terms of technical mastery.

Still, the Nice understood one thing very well indeed: if some of your band members lack polish in terms of technical intricacy, make up for it with volume. This is a proto-symphonic prog assault on the ears; whilst in the same year landmark albums from Procol Harum and the Moody Blues demonstrated how classical influences could soften and broaden the emotional palette of rock music by opening the door to gentler musical territory, this album proved without a doubt that classical music can rock, with Keith Emerson's dizzying ability to string together a wide range of classical motifs and his own compositional touches into a fresh new whole being the standout feature of the album.

It would take ELP to take the artistic vision glimpsed here to its full potential - but it took the Nice to enunciate it in the first place. It's not an immediate classic on the level of In the Court of the Crimson King, but it is a foundational album of the genre which is still a highly entertaining listen in its own right, and some may prefer its more raucous and rough around the edges style to the somewhat more mannered realms of ELP.