Trilogy Missouri

Trilogy

Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Atlantic, 1972

REVIEW BY: Benjamin Ray

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 11/04/2006

Emerson, Lake and Palmer never matched the odd brilliance of their debut album, as each subsequent album became more pompous, overblown and pretentious, culminating in the bloated and nearly unlistenable Works, Vol. 1. The odd duck in that seven-year run is Trilogy, the band's third studio album and fourth release overall.

Where Trilogy fails is its lack of excitement, since part of ELP's appeal is that bombastic grandeur tempered with a slight pop appeal. This is what made the debut so good, as well as parts of Brain Salad Surgery, but here the disc goes for mannered precision over bombast. It's not what the listener wants from ELP, and it renders the band boring.

Granted, it's hard to use a word like that with a band that went out of its way to be over the top, a band that would write 20 minute songs and play them on stage using a keyboardist who would stick knives into his Hammond and play on a rotating platform. Subtlety, thy name is not Keith Emerson.

But there's a reason the band never played much from this album on stage -- it's just too calculated. "The Endless Enigma" is perhaps the most unexciting three-part song ever recorded, sounding a lot longer than its total ten minutes. Emerson's piano break in the middle ("Fugue") is somewhat interesting, but the rest of the track has a sort of bored pomposity, barely trying to be an epic. The best part is Greg Lake's lyrics, though: "Your words waste and decay / Nothing you say / Reaches my ears anyway / You never spoke a word of truth." Zing!