Has the dawn ever seen your eyes? Have the days made you so unwise?

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

12/09/71 : Tarkus - Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Our third visit with ELP and our second this year - I believe this is one of their better reviewed albums so I'm interested to visit it.

Well, the opening title track is really quite the thing - over twenty minutes of prog pomposity which doesn't really do anything or go anywhere. I assume that was the A side and the B side is a very different creature with six tracks coming in at just under eighteen minutes in total! None of which are exactly great (there's a lot of musical noodling going on) and they don't hang together at all, but at least they don't outstay their welcome - overall, I think I'm fine without ever listening to this again. It's also a most peculiar album cover.

We're at #23 in the charts this week on their last week of a fourteen week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its second week - it's weird that it dropped all the way out after this week. The top five this week were The Who, Simon & Garfunkel, Rod Stewart, The Moody Blues and Deep Purple (a new entry) with the next highest new entry being Johnny Cash (#25).

Wikipedia tells us this is their second album and the creature on the front cover is a Tarkus and if you look at the artwork in the gatefold it gives you the story of the title track which involves it hatching from an egg before fighting a load of creatures, culminating in a battle against a manticore which it loses and so retreats to a river in order to mutate into an Aquatarkus. So now you know, OK? Interestingly, a whole lot of thought and work went into that track and the rest of the album was either just thrown together on a whim or was based on stuff they'd had sitting around for ages. Critically, the album wasn't particularly well received at the time (NME complained about the "overall cacophonous ostentation") but is now considered to be a "quintessential progressive rock album" - and in '12 was given the honour of receiving a 5.1 stereo mix by Steven Wilson. Commercially, it did way better than I expected globally, getting to #1 in Italy and Spain and #9 in the US.

discogs.com tells us that £4 will get a gatefold vinyl copy and that's got to be good value for the Tarkus story artwork - apparently if you want one with a Howards sleeve (whatever that is) it's going to set you back £100 though. This was a game of two halves for me - the first side was classic prog and the second side was just a mess, with the only thing linking the two being that neither was particularly enjoyable.

19/09/71 - Remarkably average

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