Emerson, Lake & Palmer The Hi Res Album Collection 1970 79 (flac 24 96)

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. Well, such is the idea for an Emerson, Lake & Palmer compilation, but this one does tend to fall a bit short, literally. After all, since it was originally released as an LP, the disc comes in at less than 40 minutes. Certainly with a catalog as rich as Emerson, Lake & Palmer's it is extremely difficult for one CD (especially a short one) to truly capture the essence of the group. This one fails both as a chronological compilation and as the best-of that it is billed as being. That said, there are some good points here. "Lucky Man," "Peter Gunn," and "Still You Turn Me On" are all essential Emerson, Lake & Palmer cuts that truly work well here.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer's most successful and well-realized album (after their first), and their most ambitious as a group, as well as their loudest, Brain Salad Surgery was also the most steeped in electronic sounds of any of their records. The main focus, thanks to the three-part "Karn Evil 9," is sci-fi rock, approached with a volume and vengeance that stretched the art rock audience's tolerance to its outer limit, but also managed to appeal to the metal audience in ways that little of Trilogy did. Indeed, "Karn Evil 9" is the piece and the place where Keith Emerson and his keyboards finally matched in both music and flamboyance the larger-than-life guitar sound of Jimi Hendrix. This also marked the point in the group's history in which they brought in their first outside creative hand, in the guise of ex-King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield…

After the heavily distorted bass and doomsday church organ of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's debut album, the exhilarating prog rock of epic proportions on Tarkus, and the violent removal of the sacred aura of classical tunes on Pictures at an Exhibition, Trilogy, ELP's fourth album, features the trio settling down in more crowd-pleasing pastures. Actually, the group was gaining in maturity what they lost in raw energy. Every track on this album has been carefully thought, arranged, and performed to perfection, a process that also included some form of sterilization. Greg Lake's acoustic ballad "From the Beginning" put the group on the charts for a second time. The adaptation of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown" also yielded a crowd-pleaser…