Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery

Released - November 1973

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - Greg Lake

Selected Personnel - Keith Emerson (Piano/Organ/Harpsichord/Synthesiser/Keyboards); Greg Lake (Vocals/Guitar/Bass); Carl Palmer (Drums/Percussion)

Standout Track - Karn Evil 9

As I mentioned in my review for the intermittently brilliant and occasionally wearing Tarkus, the supergroup trio of Emerson, Lake & Palmer have always been the only one of the biggest prog bands of the early 70s that I've consistently had trouble really enjoying. King Crimson, by and large, were able to dilute the avant-garde experamentalism of Robert Fripp into music that was genuinely exciting and ferocious; Yes, despite all their grandiose ambition and over-the-top grandeur, were able to write songs that were genuinely catchy and memorable and beautiful and lodged a place in their minds; Genesis, while far from being my favourite prog bands, were more than capable of making music that was fun and striking more often than it was tedious. When I look over the parts of ELP's discography that I've got round to listening to, they're far too often reliant on indulgent shows of instrumental prowess rather than creating something musically compelling. That's true of pretty much every album of theirs I've heard, but 1973's Brain Salad Surgery is the closest they got to making something truly brilliant.

It was the first ELP album I ever listened to, on the recommendation of Jack, who was in the midst of his crusade to get me as whole-heartedly obsessed by prog as he was (in which he was wholly successful, as this blog has shown). Today, having become more familiar with their work as a whole, I'm able to see Brain Salad Surgery more as a culmination and a career peak than as an isolated work of brilliance. After Tarkus in 1971, which it took me a long time to really enjoy, the trio followed it up with Trilogy the following year, an album which delivered one of their biggest hits in the form of the beautiful acoustic Greg Lake ballad "From The Beginning," as well as a couple of brilliantly fun pieces in the form of a cover of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown" and a similarly-themed original piece called "The Sheriff." Unfortunately, I've always found it difficult to really consider Trilogy a great album as the rest of it consists of a number of lengthy and self-indulgent suites that did little to grab me or stay with me over the years. One of the trio's biggest frustrations with the record was that it was heavily reliant on overdubbing and technical trickery that made it difficult to replicate many of the songs live (probably a small mercy for paying audiences at the time given that most of the pieces that were so difficult to recreate were the aforementioned tedious suites). As such, a top priority for the followup album was to craft pieces of music out of live performance and to maintain a focus on the ability to play them on tour. This ambition would go on to enable ELP to undertake their first full-scale world tour over the following year that would be documented in an ambitious three-disk live album in 1974 that I've never had the inclination to listen to.

The result of this newfound focus on live performance, then, was Brain Salad Surgery and, by and large, it's the finest collection of songs the band would ever assemble. The tone and style is largely similar to what they'd been doing for the last few years now - the focus, as ever, is principally on the keyboard wizardry and pyrotechnics of Keith Emerson, whose organs and synthesisers propel things forward effortlessly, and sensationally. It's still genuinely exciting and unusual to listen to 70s rock music that's built around weird keyboard noises and acrobatics rather than guitars. Even other artists who made rock music with keyboards, like the simple pop fare of Billy Joel and Elton John, could never hope to emulate the sounds and talents of Emerson, so listening to this kind of music still feels like something never rivaled or emulated by any other band, which gives it a unique frill. Lake rarely stands out massively as a bassist or guitarist, generally serving to support and decorate the more showy work of Emerson, but his voice remains one of the most gutsy in rock music, while Carl Palmer has always been one of those rare drummers that are so good you actually notice them rather than their just becoming a part of the rhythmic tapestry of a song.

For the best album of their career, things kick off fairly weakly on Brain Salad Surgery - the cover of Parry's "Jerusalem" is a fairly by-the-numbers and insipid affair that does little except demonstrate the band's by-now de rigeur insistence on "updating" a piece of classical music for every album. The trouble is, "Jerusalem" is already a brilliant piece and has no need of being updated, particularly when said effort at updating amounts to simply being sung over a particularly ostentatious organ part. If things had really taken off with one of Emerson's psychotic organ solos it could perhaps have effected a genuinely exciting transformation of the piece, but as it is it just feels fairly perfunctory. Things get worse on "Toccata," a reworking of the Fourth Movement of Alberto Ginastera's Piano Concerto. I'm not familiar with the original piece myself, but Emerson's arrangement of it does it no favours. It comes across as another typical ELP slice of self-indulgence, struggling to ever find a decent tune and serving generally just to irritate and annoy.

But if the listener can make it through the disappointing opening duo, there are great things in store. "Still...You Turn Me On" is one of the most haunting and concise songs the trio ever recorded, despite the atrocious lyrics ("Every day a little sadder, a little madder, someone get me a ladder.") The way the song erupts from its gentle acoustic verse into the weird guitar arpeggios of the chorus is a genuinely exciting moment, and undoubtedly the song as a whole is Lake's finest moment on the record. It's followed up by the slight but fun "Benny The Bouncer," an almost novelty song in the vein of Trilogy's "The Sheriff" that emulates the honky-tonk jazzy stylings of old music-hall and vaudeville and sees Lake fully in character with one of his most committed vocal performances.

And then there's the reason why this album achieves greatness - the vast, sprawling epic that is "Karn Evil 9." Without doubt among the very finest epic suites in prog rock history, it's also easily Emerson, Lake & Palmer's finest achievement. Initially split across the two sides of the LP due to its ludicrous length (approaching half an hour), it moves through a few distinct sections, all of which manage to thrill and excite and engage the listener far more than anything else in the band's discography. When I first encountered the album, I was firmly of the mindset that the piece only needed to be fifteen minutes long and that its second half struggled to really capture the excitement of the first. Today, it's still true that the second half moves into very different territory and is never quite as memorable as the first half, but the excitement of it still never lets up. That first half is quite simply wonderful, and possibly the most relentless fifteen minutes of music in rock history. The pace simply doesn't drop once, and after the initial pouding bassline and jazzy acrobatics of Emerson's keyboards are established, they continue propelling things for a long time. While this first half shifts through different moods (and even finds time for a rather good guitar solo from Lake), it's kept grounded by the same musical theme and melody (the famous "Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends" line from midway through this section would become the most famous part of the song). This first half concludes in a triumphant finale with pounding timpani and wailing synthesisers before shifting into the "Second Impression," a lengthy (and again Emerson-centric) instrumental passage, and perhaps the only one of such ELP pieces that never loses the listener's attention. Incorporating a dizzying steel drum part and segueing into a slower, more contemplative piano piece, things eventually return to the song-based format of the first half, but now with a decidedly space-age and triumphant tone. Here, the lyrics (co-written by Lake's former King Crimson cohort Pete Sinfield) take a turn for typical prog rock pomp and excess, telling the story of a futuristic war between humans and computers (in this section's most memorable moments, Emerson voices the computer itself using the ring modulator of his synthesiser, using the same technique used to create the voices of the Daleks in Doctor Who). Ultimately, it is difficult to feel that anything that happens in these latter stages of the piece really bears up well alongside the brilliance of the first half, but as time's gone by I've come to really enjoy the whole thing as a characteristically ludicrous and over-the-top slice of prog excess par excellence.

Such was the length of "Karn Evil 9" that certain pieces, including the would-be title track "Brain Salad Surgery" itself, had to be left off the album (it's a fairly underwhelming piece, but probably would have been more welcome than "Toccata.") What ELP were left with was an album that achieved brilliance far more consistently than anything else they had done up until that point, although it was still characteristically flawed. For me, while I love Brain Salad Surgery and think it achieves some incredible stuff, the fact that in none of the ELP albums I've listened to have they managed to avoid their habit of self-indulgent nonsense entirely has dissuaded me from ever delving further into their discography than the four albums I've heard - for me, that's enough. From this point on, ELP's fortunes would slowly decline as prog became increasingly unpopular throughout the 70s, and all I really know about them after this was that they released this bizarrely Bee Gees-looking record in 1978:

Strangely, I've never felt much need to listen to it. I saw ELP live a few years ago at 2010's High Voltage Festival and felt incredibly grateful to have seen songs like "Karn Evil 9," "Lucky Man" and "From The Beginning" live, but beyond that, my interest in ELP never went much further. Ultimately, as far as I'm concerned, a band that managed to achieve some greatness but were kept from being consistently brilliant by their own inability to rein themselves in.

Track Listing:

1. Jerusalem (William Blake & Hubert Parry; adapted by Keith Emerson, Greg Lake & Carl Palmer)

2. Toccata (Alberto Ginastera, arranged by Keith Emerson)

3. Still...You Turn Me On (Greg Lake)

4. Benny The Bouncer (Keith Emerson, Greg Lake & Pete Sinfield)

5. Karn Evil 9 (Keith Emerson, Greg Lake & Pete Sinfield)