NICE [AKA: EVERYTHING AS NICE AS MOTHER MAKES IT]

The Nice's debut album - The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack - was so cutting edge and full of promise, but the departure of lead guitarist David O'List really threw the project out of whack. Strife and grief (especially from O'List's camp) in later years lamented record label Immediate's positioning of Keith Emerson as the leader of the group, but it's hard to listen to even their best material and not come away with the sense that Emerson was the real breakthrough talent, and the best thing everyone else could do was simply follow his play and let him cook.

This became all the more obvious when O'List - the second most promising talent in the group - left. Ars Longa Vita Brevis, the first album in the trio format, consists of some half-assed joke songs, a classical interpretation, and the side- long title track, and perhaps the kindest thing that could be said about it is that it brought a lot of fresh new ideas to the table but didn't execute them brilliantly, and that it would take other bands - including Emerson's next project, ELP - to actually take that rough blueprint, cast aside the bits which weren't working, and tighten up the bits with potential.

But hey - it was a transitional album. You can be forgiven one of those when your band's had a setback. At some point, however, your band needs to complete that transition and actually pull together, or your project isn't long for this world.

Which brings me to the subject of this review: Nice, the third album by the group and the actual subject of this review. (Don't worry, gang, there's a reason I recapped the last two albums above.) Taken by itself, this may come across as an alright but not great slice of proto-symphonic prog from early in the genre's existence - with a decent keyboardist, vocals which are a bit middling, and a major burden in terms of the production.

Production was a bit of a problem with all three albums that the Nice made for Immediate, who I can only conclude simply cheaped out when it came to the recording process. (They were cash-strapped at the time, and by the next year had gone bankrupt.) There's a couple of live tracks on here - taking up the entirety of the second side on vinyl - and one suspects that one reason for their conclusion was a realisation that the live recordings sounded better than the studio tracks, where the production job is simply a touch too thin to do the material justice.

It will also not escape the attention of the listener enjoying this in isolation that a chunk of this material consists of cover versions. Of course, they're Nice-ified cover versions, but by this point in the 1960s did we really, truly need yet another band padding out their set with Bob Dylan covers? Especially Bob Dylan covers which consist of a snippet of a Bob Dylan song and then lots of additional improvisations and flourishes? You don't even need to dig into the history of the band to get the sense that there's a songwriting shortfall here.

But let's widen our lens and take in the band's back catalogue now. The debut album was right on the cutting edge of what would become known as progressive rock, brought a swathe of fresh ideas to the table, and had a rough and ready approach to it which made it possible to forgive the production shortcomings. The second album had its production difficulties and might have leaned a little too hard on novelty numbers on its first side, and its second side epic proves that there's a difference between "groundbreaking" and "good", but there was at least a sense that new ideas were being brought to the table; an effort is clearly being made even if the results aren't what they could be.

Here, though, we have cover versions, we have rehashes of material that the Nice had already put out (Azrael and Rondo), and that's kind of it. There's no sense of forward momentum here; if anything, the band seem to have regressed a bit compared to the ambitions of Ars Longa Vita Brevis, and if you're a prog listener you'd probably rather listen to an ambitious work which fumbled than an unambitious work which aimed for "satisfactory" and just about made the cut.

Widen the lens further, and let's look at what other bands are doing in 1969. The Moody Blues, who put out their first proto-symphonic album in the same year as the Nice's debut, will out out not one but two albums this year - On the Threshold of a Dream and To Our Children's Children's Children. Not only could either of those releases absolutely wipe the floor with this album without breaking much of a sweat, but both albums find the band advancing their style, as has the intervening In Search of the Lost Chord. Meanwhile, an upstart group called King Crimson is unleashing a debut album on the world which will be an utterly transformative work in the genre of progressive work, a quantum leap building on the efforts of predecessors - including the Nice - but reaching wholly new territory hitherto untouched. I could talk here about the 1968-1969 accomplishments of groups the Nice had toured with back in 1967 such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Pink Floyd, but that would be beating a dead horse.

The idea that Nice could possibly stand out in a musical scene which was experiencing the Big Bang moment which was In the Court of the Crimson King is, in retrospect, laughable. But even at the time, it should surely have been obvious that the Nice just weren't keeping up with their peers. Acts which had emerged at the same time they did had outpaced them in terms of subsequent musical development. Brand new bands were emerging which left the Nice looking like old-fashioned anachronisms within a mere two years after The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack put them at the spearhead of the movement.

It might have been harsh of Keith Emerson to have expressed the view, towards the end of 1969, that the Nice had outlived its usefulness - but I defy anyone to listen to this album and tell me that the Nice were thriving. The fact is that after a debut which was both historically important to the genre genuinely good, and a second album which was far less consistent but at least still originated some important prog ideas, their self-titled album fails on all measures. It's not a well-produced and tightly written 43 minutes of music on its own terms, it's far from the best album in the Nice discography, and whilst the previous two albums were key moments in prog history (even if, to my taste, only the debut remains satisfying to listen to), the only historical value this one has is that it demonstrates why the band had to end.

This had a brief surge of commercial success when it first came out, but its comparative obscurity next to In the Court of the Crimson King, the two Moody Blues releases of 1969, Electric Ladyland - or freakin' UMMAGUMMA, for crying out loud! - is the surest proof that it simply lacked staying power. And that was pretty much that for the Nice. Sure, a couple of posthumous releases - Five Bridges and Elegy - crept out after the fact. But hailing from late 1969 and cobbled together from live shows, they hail from a point in time when the writing was already on the wall, Emerson was already looking at putting together a supergroup (a big chunk of the early drive behind Emerson, Lake & Palmer seems to have been "Let's do trio-era Nice, but make it WORK this time!"), and the slide towards oblivion was too late to halt. They crawled into early 1970, but by that point were continuing out of politeness rather than passion, seeing out their last few dates before walking away for good.