WORKING LIVE VOLUME 2

So the question is 'Do You Want ELP music played by a guitar based band and no keyboards?'. If so then this is the place to be. After ELP's last split in 1999 Carl decided to form his own band and went off to play (mostly) small venues around England.Dave Marks (bass) and Shaun Baxter(guitar) were recruited, both (I think) coming from a music teaching background.Very skilled players and they needed to be.I've seen this line up on both tours and have to say that the CD's don't really capture their power for some reason.Either the sound is too clean or perhaps the recorded peformances were'nt their best..or perhaps its difficult to translate the live experience onto record.Shame really but that said both discs are perfectly listenable and would certainly be of interest to ELP/Carl Palmer fans. However I would recommend saving your money instead for the DVD 'Live In Europe' which is more enjoyable..and you have visuals!

This isn't your Daddy's ELP. No Greg Lake to sing his silly poetry and no keyboards?!? There are still synthesizers though all played through guitar and bass oh and of course still the blazing drums of Carl Palmer. As the afore mentioned reviewer pointed out this doesn't come across as powerful as it does live but even still the music is played masterfully by the three musicians involved. Shaun Baxter take the role of Keith Emerson on his guitarand it is a bit thin sounding in parts but not so much so that you hate it.

By playing such classic ELP instrumental pieces like Eruption and Aquatarkus, Hoedown and the instrumental parts of Trilogy there is enough familiarity with the music to really appreciate the players. It would seem to me though that this mostly might be for ELP purists however there may be some Rush fans out there who might be interested in what this trio came up with I think or for anyone who has ever asked themselves what would ELP be like with a guitar as the lead. I really believe this is much better in person and if you have a chance to catch this go do so but if you can't this isn't bad to take out once in a while for a change of pace. Three stars for excellent musicianship but really nothing new or groundbreaking.

There were some prior attempts to fool the fans with the ''great'' suite of ''Works'' affairs from ELP which were very questionable recordings IMHHO.

This one is not shy of course. If noise and heaviness is your cup of tea, you might taste this one with joy. But you are warned: this is totally indigestible stuff. Some classics of the trio are revisited (as you know already with no keyboards, what a great idea!).

Frankly, we could have missed this one. The ''Working Live, Volume I'' was already a poor performance, and honestly this one is just some carbon copy. I was almost glad to have an emasculated version of ''Tarkus''. A seven minutes disaster to tell the truth.

To provide you with the full picture, I will only add that the closing track ''Fanfare And Drum Solo'' lasts for about sixteen minutes.

I have an enormous respect for Carl as a drummer of the ones you might know about (I even witnessed their ''Welcome Back My Friends.'' tour in '74), but this is really something I can't cope with.

One star. Painful.

On "Working Live Volume 1", Carl Palmer used up all of the best ELP songs that he was particularly associated with, like Tank and Tocatta. Here on Volume 2 he goes after othe ELP classics.

The big problem (besides not having Keith Emerson) is that he cuts down the pieces to something playable by his singerless band. Trilogy skips right over the soft vocal start of the song, and goes right to the heavy instrumental section. Now, I love that part of the song, but without the intro, it loses much of it's power. And Tarkus is absolutely maimed.

If you want to hear a guitar-centric version of Hoedown, I would direct you to The Jon Finn Group for a better rendition than this one. And the jazzy jam J Section never quite takes off.

On the plus side, they do a version of Carmina Burana (yeah, I know how over used that piece is that really rocks. And their version of Fanfare For The Common Man is better than the one chord jam ELP always turned it into.

I'd say this one is for ELP completists only.