Howling At The Moon - The Punk Panther's Album Reviews

  In the early-mid seventies, my teenage attitude to prog rock "supergroup" Emerson, Lake & Palmer mirrored that which I had toward their fellow proggers, Yes. I loathed them and everything they stood for - extended, indulgent LP side-long tracks, quasi-classical keyboard doodling, pompous or high-pitched vocals, lyrical pretentiousness, a predilection for fantasy in both lyrics and cover art and, above all else - as with Genesis and Pink Floyd - my contempt for virtually every boy I knew who liked them (girls didn't like this sort of thing, on the whole, certainly not younger teenage ones). I hated those boys and their haughty musical taste, so I developed an intrinsic and - I have always thought - healthy aversion to all things prog.  Furthermore, as much as many people were talking about David Bowie or Roxy Music in 1972-73, it was albums by ELP or Yes that shifted units and often made it to number one in the album charts.  In so many ways, theirs was the sound of

  This was a schizophrenic album.  The old "side one" contained only one track - the twenty minute-plus opus of  Tarkus . Like Yes, the group merged together several separate pieces of music under the umbrella of one title. I feel that ELP's material knitted together better than Yes's though. Where theirs was somewhat cut and paste, ELP's seemed to have more flow and cohesion, playing as one piece of music albeit with several changes of pace and ambience.  There is lots of keyboard virtuosity on here but also some excellent drumming and riffery too. As with all prog rock, I am able to sift bits that I really like from each track, but there are also bits that I could do without, for sure.   The  second half of the album is, in my opinion, populated with short tracks of throwaway nonsense. It was maybe supposed to showcase the band's playful side, but it simply comes over as eminently disposable. Emerson loses his classical pretensions and goes all barroom and L

  Yes, I am going to do this one too... The Endless Enigma Part 1  features some surprisingly rhythmic bongos and some Eastern-sounding strings as well as powerhouse drumming from Carl Palmer. It is another of those multi-passage suites, although only a six minute one this time. As with the group’s previous material, I like some of the parts, but find the vocal bits overblown and mildly irritating. It contains some of their heaviest sounds, though.  Fugue  is a brief piano interlude before we get  The Endless Enigma Part 2 , which is also brief, but carries a rock power along with more annoying typically prog vocals.  From The Beginning  is a gentle, acoustic, folky Greg Lake piece that has its appeal. To be honest, I much prefer these more regular songs to their instrumental innovations. There is always one on each album. Those acoustic strummed parts remind me quite a lot of Paul Weller’s early solo material. The song has a nice, bassier, more percussive alternative version too.  Now

And this one as well....bloody hell.... So here we have one of ELP's most successful albums.  Now, I love William Blake’s  Jerusalem , (a socialist anthem later hijacked by English public schools) and ELP give it a fine thumping sound here. Somehow it fits that this hymn that was so beloved of privileged schoolboys was covered by a group that those boys went crazy for.  Tocatta  featured some typical Emerson keyboard indulgence, along with some heavy bits that I quite like. A lot of it is a discordant racket, however. You can stick this, to be honest.  There is, however, as I said in the review for Trilogy, always one impressive “proper” song in each album, and this one’s offering is the Pink Floyd-ish  Still...You Turn Me   On . Why, it even gets funky at one point too, with some wah-wah guitar. If ELP made albums full of this sort of stuff I may have a different opinion of their work. This song was a good one.  As on Tarkus, ELP also felt the need to be “funny” on occasions, and