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!
"From The Beginning" netted the band its highest-charting single, which is fair since it's a melancholy song driven only by Lake's guitar and bass and some light bongo drums. There is no chorus to speak of other than Lake crooning the title, but it's a bit of a regretful love song: "Maybe I might have changed /
And not been so cruel / Not been such a fool," Lake sings, with genuine pain. It's one of the band's best moments.
Emerson tries to liven things up a bit with "The Sheriff," one of those stupid honky-tonk Western songs this British band tried to do, and like the others of its ilk it wastes time and space, save for the last 30 seconds where Emerson's piano enters hyper-speed. Following this is a Copland tune, "Hoedown," that became the band's calling card of sorts. The problem is, while the tracks threatens to break out into something exciting, it never really does, sort of chugging along behind Emerson's fleet fingers for three minutes.
A heavy sigh seems to permeate this disc, perhaps the reason "Hoedown" sounds more muted than it should and the best song is a melancholy four-minute ballad ("From the Beginning," if you weren't paying attention). The title track is another three-part tune, starting with a serene piano intro and Lake's voice before giving into a stomping rock piece (as stomping as you can get with keyboards and no guitar). It's about the only moment on the disc that's exciting but it comes far too late.
"Living Sin" is an embarrassing attempt at a rock song, with Lake's growling vocals grating instead of tough and the whole feel of a love conquest sounding fake, while the closing "Abaddon's Bolero" is just nine minutes of endless noodling, not satisfying at all. Naturally, it's eight minutes long, but nobody ever accused this band of knowing when to quit.
So while this is not a bad disc, like some of the band's later work, it's certainly not an exciting one. There are a handful of moments to make it interesting, and the band's professionalism and chemistry makes it listenable, but it rarely reaches the brilliance of the debut or the overblown grandeur of Brain Salad Surgery, which came out a year after this release.
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