Feedtime Nice

Essential: a masterpiece of progressive-rock music.
As Nice As Mother Makes It
After two very robust but patchy albums the Nice adopted a slightly different approach to their third by exploiting a half live/half studio hybrid.

The Time It Takes released by Oskar in 2015. The brand new album, a progressive monster with a harder edge. Over ten years in the making, but well worth the wait. Nice Beaver was founded in 1997, when members of local bands Scotty! and For Cryin' Out Loud decided to work together. The group stems from Papendrecht, a small town near Rotterdam. The name Nice Beaver refers to a joke from the movie Naked Gun, where a game is played with perceptions and expectations. Sometimes things are not what you perceive them to be, and sometimes what you see is what you get. A similar game with reality and our expectations can be heard in the music of Nice Beaver. Deceptively simple rhythms turn out to contradict the melody, while the most complex patterns produce groovy tunes.

Comprised of songs cut during the final 13 months of the Nice's existence, Elegy is a must-own title for fans of Keith Emerson, offering his best live performance on piano ("Hang On to a Dream") ever to get a legal release, showcasing his organ playing on unique and beguiling arrangements of Tchaikovsky and Dylan material…

Originally, this collection was put together in 1972 by Tony Stratton-Smith from outtakes of the Nice's early stay at Immediate Records, and issued (at least, in the U.S.) with no explanation and little annotation, making it a bit confusing to longtime fans of Keith Emerson and the trio. Its timing was also unfortunate, in that a huge cache of record club copies of the Nice's first three albums on Immediate, pressed by Columbia Special Products, had shown up in cut-out bins at just about the same time…