Emerson Lake & Palmer - Works, Volume 1

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Music reviews of Works, Volume 1

Music Review: Sharp decline begins
Rating: 3 Stars

I don't mind the "pretentiousness" of this album: that's just a hack's word for "ambition". What's wrong with this is that the ambition doesn't come off.

There are three solo sides, one each for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. What they show is that the three of them, but especially Emerson/Lake, were almost invariably best when they were writing together.

The Emerson side, with a reasonably good piano concerto, is the best of the solo sections. His concerto is derivative of Gershwin and Rachmaninov, but it's a respectable piece of music. If I were listening to it without knowing what it was, I'd guess it was from a minor but competent composer, written in the 1930s. On the whole that's a compliment. The third movement, _Toccata con Fuoco_, is genuinely memorable, not just "not bad for a piano concerto written by a rock musician" but actually "sit up and listen to this; it's good!"

The Greg Lake side is a problem. I like Lake's contributions the best on ELP albums, up until this one. But it's at this point, I think, that Lake started to let the ELP side down. I guess after singing for years about metal monsters and spectres and so on, he wanted to reinvent himself as a sensitive singer-songwriter, a love balladeer, which might be fair enough. But I wish he'd written better love ballads.

"C'est la vie" is the best of them. It's not a bad song at all, but I never enjoy it as much as the Lake ballads that I love: "Lucky Man", "Take a Pebble", "From the beginning", and so on. The first problem is the dreadful Hollywood Strings backing, which uses every awful soupy strings cliche: long swoops, cheesy climaxes, a burst of "French" accordian... This stuff is the reason you have to leave the room when your grandmother plays a Mantovani record (if she does that sort of thing).

The other problem is more sinister. Greg isn't singing very well. He's turned baritone, and his baritone voice isn't as good as his tenor, but that's not the only problem. The other problem is that he over-produces the song, sings with too much emphasis on some words, and generally wants you to notice his voice. It's all rather hammy. I listened with discomfort, and I realised that I could never play this to anyone who wasn't already a huge ELP fan, because I'd lose them immediately...

And as I say, "C'est la Vie" is the best of these songs. "Closer to believing" is also okay. And there's a Dylan impersonation on "Nobody loves you like I do" that's not bad either. (It turns out that Lake was hanging round with Dylan at the time. They wrote a song together, "I love you too much" that turns up on Lake's first solo album. It's not a great song, though the solo album, "Greg Lake", is probably better than "Works Vol 1" overall.) The other songs are forgettable and dismissable.

Carl Palmer's side is eclectic and contains two good moments. He adds a drum track to "The enemy god dances with the black spirits" (more or less), the last section of Prokoffief's "Scythian Suite". It sounds good, though that piece of music also sounds good without the drum track. And he does an all-percussion arrangement of a Bach invention, which is also good.

The rest is anonymous Californian middle-of-the-road stuff, "LA Nights" with Joe Walsh being embarrassing, and some bad big band stuff, including an unnecessary orchestral re-working of "Tank" from the first album. Despite that, I probably play the two highlights of this side marginally more often than I play any of the Lake tracks, these days.

Then we have the climax with the three of them together. A lot of people like the first piece, their reworking of "Fanfare for the Common Man". I like the opening fanfare, but I think the organ sound, a sort of buzzy out-of-tiune noise that Emerson chose for the jamming section is a mistake. It makes the main body of their version nearly unlistenable, for me.

The big surprise for me is "Pirates". This ought to be bad. It has so much against it: a long, orchestral-backed song about pirates, with Pete Sinfield lyrics. You might expect something like unintentional Gilbert and Sullivan.

But somehow, this one works for me. Lake sings much better on this piece than he does on his own side, getting back some of the flair and passion (and the high notes) that used to make his voice so awe-inspiring. And the lyrics are pretentious, sure, and certainly not aimed at a rock crowd, but they're good enough to justify their pretension. I'm not sure that I'd have recommended that they do this, but they've done it pretty well. I find that all of the music on this album, it's this track that sticks in my mind, and that I most often come back to.

But I'd recommend that if you want to find out why people like ELP, as opposed to "find out what ELP sound like when they're trying experiments that mostly don't work", you should try ELP, Tarkus, Pictures at an Exhibition, or Brain Slad Surgery. And if you like that, go on to the "Welcome back my friends to the title that never ends..." live album.

This is at best second-rate ELP, interesting in parts, and commendably brave, but not a satisfactory whole.

Cheers!

Laon

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