He had white horses and ladies by the score

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

28/02/71 : Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Our fourth visit with ELP and our third this year - it looks like the prog kings are going to be declared kings of the prog year, so I think we know what we're going to be getting here.

Hmmm - yes, it's very prog indeed. There's certainly no doubting the skills involved - Emerson in particular shines on the keyboards playing a lot of notes very quickly in many places on the album (Palmer also does an awful lot of drumming on "Tank", but we don't need to talk about that). But - does that make it great? Or even likeable? I didn't mind "Lucky Man" but apart from that I'm really not so sure - and I think that's probably all I have to say on the matter at this time, your honour.

We're at #11 in the charts this week on their fourteenth week of a very decent 26 week run, with #4 being as high as it got in its second week. The top five this week were George Harrison,, Elton John, Simon & Garfunkel, Andy Williams and Elton John (a good week for the lad) with the highest new entry being Taste (#18) who I've never heard of - they were an Irish blues/rock group formed by Rory Gallagher.

Wikipedia tells us this is their debut album and they recorded it a couple of months after they formed and before they'd played live at all. The tracks are either original compositions by the group members or reworking of classical pieces by Bela Bartok, Leoš Janáček and Johann Sebastian Bach. I also learned that Emerson plays a clavinet on this, which is an electric clavichord strongly associated with Stevie Wonder, particularly for "Superstition" - they stopped making it in '82, but they're so loved that people still maintain them to keep them going. 

Critically, people mostly loved the album, with many considering it to be their best work but Robert Christgau was not impressed - "clunky... heavy-handed semi-improvisations and would-be tone poems" (and whilst I hate to agree with him, it certainly is clunky and heavy-handed in plenty of places). It's obviously still highly regarded by some though because it got a Steven Wilson 5.1 remix in '12, but I suspect I can live without checking that out. Commercially, it did better than you might expect globally, getting to #9 in Australia, #7 in Germany (and #16 in their year-end list), #4 in The Netherlands and #18 in the US. 

discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent copy for £2.50, but if you want a copy with pink labels then it's going to set you back £380 - those pink labels don't come cheap, I guess. I'm pleased I've got to visit ELP this year from a "filling in gaps in my musical experience" point of view, but I think we've pretty much reached the point that I've had enough of them now (probably forever).

07/03/71 - Another decent album