ORIGINAL ALBUMS

This is a budget-priced boxed set of the first four ELP studio albums and their first live album (Pictures At An Exhibition). BMG didn't prepare brand new remasters or anything of the material for this, and no bonus tracks are included - essentially, if you've got the 2CD releases of this material which came out in the mid-2010s with the original album on CD1 and bonus material on CD2, then this is all the "CD1s" from those sets.

Then again, if you're not too fussed about bonus tracks and just want nice-sounding CDs of the original material - as will be the case for many listeners who aren't adamant completists - that might be exactly what you want. It's certainly a nicely packaged and modestly priced set of the truly groundbreaking ELP studio material; after this you get into Works, Love Beach, and the Reunion albums, all releases which at the kindest you could say have a "mixed reception" and even whose defenders will rarely argue actually exceed the quality of the band's early work.

I've gone on the record as saying that I don't think ELP ever put out a true five-star studio album - they came tantalisingly close but their debut was not quite there yet, and from Tarkus onwards they developed an irritating habit of throwing in annoying novelty tracks (a gimmick Emerson had resorted to in The Nice as well, with similarly uninspiring results) which inevitably drag down the score in my eyes. That being the case, the studio releases here by and large end are those where the cream outweighs the crud - the most marginal one to my ears being Brain Salad Surgery, and even then I quite enjoy that when I am in the right mood for it.

Adding in Pictures At An Exhibition is a particularly classy move; lots of sets like this would skip live albums, but since Pictures consists of material recorded especially for that release rather than for a studio album doing so would leave a gap here. The only thing I'd really feel is missing from this is Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends, which I consider to be not just ELP's best live album but also the true five-star classic of their catalogue. Equally, that's a massive release which spans two CDs, and comes from just a shade after the time span covered here anyway; if you get this box plus BMG's remaster of Welcome Back My Friends I'd say you've got the cream of the crop of the ELP catalogue in one fell swoop.

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