3.2: THIRD IMPRESSION

A Fond Farewell

With both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake gone, Robert Berry's 3.2 is the closest we will ever get to new music from ELP - and serious fans of that famous group are going to love this! Third Impression is the second and final album Berry has made under the moniker of 3.2, and the third album overall (hence the title) including the original 3 album from 1988.

The group 3 was essentially ELP, but with Berry instead of Lake, and with a more streamlined approach fitting to the 80's. Many years later, not long before Keith Emerson's death, Emerson and Berry had started working together again, writing songs for what was intended as a late follow-up to To the Power of Three. Sadly, this project was not completed while Emerson was still alive, but amazingly Berry completed and complemented the music they had worked on and this eventually became The Rules Have Changed. That album was released in 2018 - 30 years after To the Power of Three!

That could have been the end of the story, but Berry had one more unreleased song that he and Keith had worked on together. That song now appears on this album together with nine other songs written by Berry alone. I did not expect to ever see another 3.2 album, but Berry has done it again! Like on The Rules Have Changed, Berry sings and plays everything himself, including drums; bass; guitars; and the keyboards, which again sound as if Keith is alive! Berry is multi-talented.

The song co-written with Emerson is Never, which stands up well beside Desde La Vida from To the Power of Three, and Last Ride Into the Sun, a song that was written by Emerson, Berry, and Carl Palmer, but ended up on Berry's solo album Pilgrimage to a Point. Other strong tracks on Third Impression include opener Top of the World and A Fond Farewell, but there are no weak tracks as such. Emotional Trigger is a jazzy piece that brings to mind something from ELP's Works Vol. II.

Overall, I enjoy this as much as I did The Rules Have Changed. If you are a fan of ELP and are hungry for more music in the extended family of that band, you cannot go wrong with Third Impression.

I always felt that 3, the band formed by Keith Emerson, Carl Palmer and Robert Berry was tremendously under-rated and their solitary album a triumph (I also feel the same way about Emerson, Lake & Powell). Everyone was amazed when news came out that Berry and Emerson had been writing together again and there were plans for a new '3' album as '3.2'. Sadly, that was never to be during Emerson's lifetime, but Berry then sat down and recorded the planned album on his own, bringing their ideas to fruition and the result was the excellent 'The Rules Have Changed.' Most people think of Berry as a guitarist, singer and songwriter, yet he is a full-blown multi-instrumentalist, one of the very few who are an accomplished singer as well as musician.

No-one really expected another 3.2 album, but there was the small matter of "Never", the last song written together by Keith and Robert, so what to do with it? The answer was to write and record another 3.2 album using sounds and styles which would have been approved by Keith and familiar to fans of his work, and yet again the result is superb. Listening to "What Side You're On", one would be hard pressed not to think of Keith as the keyboard sounds are exactly what one would expect from him. Berry has always approached music from a more commercial AOR manner than the classically inspired prog of Emerson, but here has reined in the more overt stylings which one can hear with his work with The Alliance and has again produced an album which could well have been a follow-up to the 1988 classic. This is an album which any fan of the more commercial side of ELP, or 3, will surely love the first time of hearing. Also, Robert has now formed a touring band with keyboard player Andrew Colyer (Circuline), drummer/vocalist Jimmy Keegan from Spock's Beard, guitarist/vocalist Paul Keller, who toured with Keith, Robert, and Carl Palmer on the original '3' tour in 1988 with Robert providing bass and vocals. The live shows are bound to be epic, and perhaps a new album will follow, who knows? This is a sheer delight from beginning to end.