Stream of Consciousness & Music Reviews

      Brain Salad Surgery. What to say about this album? I'm genuinely struggling. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's 4h album (and coincidentally the follow-up to Trilogy, the only other ELP album I've listened to) is widely regarded as a true standout in the world of prog rock. In a certain sense, I would agree. The technicality and prowess demonstrated on the album is very impressive, especially for 1973. Emerson's keyboard and the synth are spectacular here, using novel timbres and displaying a lot of skill; with the way that they're able to convey a wordless story through a good chunk of the album is very impressive and probably my favorite aspect of it. The thing that I don't think I can avoid is compare it to Trilogy, which is both a good and bad thing. My main problem with Trilogy was how unfocused it was, never really having a solid identity or sound that it settled on or could come back to throughout and felt disjointed between the various styles and sounds i...

      My first requested album! Not specifically for this blog, just a recommendation from a friend, but why not make a review for it anyway, y'know? Emerson, Lake, And Palmer were a prog rock band, and being a big fan of another prog rock band (ELO) myself, I thought I might be slightly familiar with their music. Not even a little bit. The first track opens with light, intermittent drums developing into a barrage of synthesizers, and it only gets stranger from there. A good portion of the music on this album is instrumental, with large portions of songs having no vocals and a few songs that are purely instrumentally melodic. A lot of the sound here is similar to something you might hear in a waiting room, in the background of a video, or while on hold; what makes it different from those is how energized a lot of it, being fast and exciting as opposed to slower, while still managing to retain that semi-chill feeling that the former examples had. It's also a lot more abstr...