Amander Palmer

Lively, ambitious, almost entirely successful debut album, made up of keyboard-dominated instrumentals ("The Barbarian," "Three Fates") and romantic ballads ("Lucky Man") showcasing all three members' very daunting talents. This album, which reached the Top 20 in America and got to number four in England, showcased the group at its least pretentious and most musicianly – with the exception of a few moments on "Three Fates" and perhaps "Take a Pebble," there isn't much excess, and there is a lot of impressive musicianship here. "Take a Pebble" might have passed for a Moody Blues track of the era but for the fact that none of the Moody Blues' keyboard men could solo like Keith Emerson.

Between 1970 and 1978 Emerson Lake & Palmer were one of the most exciting rock bands on the planet and this stunning 2-disc set pulls together their greatest moments.
Featuring performances from every stage of their career, including 44 minutes of ELP headlining the massive California Jam Festival in 1974 on Disc 2 which also showcases the much sought afer footage of the famous spinning piano sequence. The DVD also contains Beyond The Beginning, an hour-long documentary, which tells the story of this remarkable band with tetreshing honesty and candour…

A 7CD box set collecting five remastered ELP performances from 1970 to 1997, culminating in an unreleased concert from Phoenix, Arizona.

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…

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.

Every child who ever learnt the recorder or played in a school orchestra will probably know the famous ‘Minuet’ included in the Overture, but they can be forgiven for knowing little else from the work since it is so rarely performed. That its premiere in London in 1737 was a failure had little to do with Handel’s score but more with a growing public indifference to Italian opera. The music, as seasoned Handelians will not need to be told, is of high quality (though not perhaps at once among his most alluring scores), and Antonio Salvis’s libretto, concerned with politics and romance, provides the composer with opportunity for lively duets and evocative ‘simile’ arias. The cast is strong, though not uniformly so, with soprano Julianne Baird in the title role.

Robert Palmer's second EMI album, which turned out to be a sales disappointment, seems to combine two different musical concepts in its 18 tracks. The first is a straightforward, rhythm-heavy Robert Palmer rock album that takes up about the first half of the record. The second is a soundtrack for a planned musical that a Palmer bio describes as "a futuristic comedy using telling songs from the '40s to the present day," some produced by jazzman Teo Macero. These include songs like Bob Dylan's "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" (done reggae style), Marvin Gaye's "Mercy Mercy Me" and "I Want You," and Rodgers & Hammerstein's "People Will Say We're in Love." The idea looks forward to Palmer's next album, Ridin' High, which is comprised entirely of standards, but the mixture of rhythm tracks and string-filled arrangements here makes for a confusing mixture.