Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Pictures at an Exhibition

Once again I doth findeth myself on the receiving end of an earful of baffling wonderment and wtf-ishness. For the purists who grew up with ELP, I realize this album was released overseas in the fall of 1971, but over here it was 1972, and if you were here in North America then it was 1972 for you too. As far as I'm concerned, this is a 1972 release, as that’s what was stamped on the centre of the record.

Here we have a live album that astounds with the sheer scope of what this trio was trying to accomplish. Recorded live at Newcastle City Hall on 26 March 1971, the little hall's capacity for an all-standing audience is apparently around 2,600 people. I suspect they played to a full house.

With only two albums under their belt, their self-titled debut and Tarkus, proposing a live album only a year or so after arriving on the scene was pretty ballsy. What they wanted to record was their arrangement of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s piano pieces, which he penned to describe paintings in sound, called Pictures at an Exhibition.

I've been listening to this off and on for about a week, and I am as beguiled today as I was when I first dropped the needle. My opinion ranges from “Man, this is cool” to “What am I listening to?” When I question the music, what I’m really complaining about are some of the instrumentation choices in a few places particularly by keyboardist Keith Emerson. Yes, I know I am looking through the wrong end of the telescope with such complaints, as the sounds on display were absolutely bleeding edge at the time.

The results are, at times, spectacular and, on occasion, a cacophonous riot of ear-piercing noise. I tend to lean toward spectacular. The conundrum for me is: “Where is the single?” You know, that musical nugget. The shiny object that you want to listen to over and over.

It may not have been a single, but it’s the original composition “The Sage,” nestled between “Promenade (Pt. 2)” and “The Old Castle,” that stands out for me. Greg Lake shows off his playing prowess, and it is a wonderful piece of music and one of the rare vocal performances on the record. This isn’t a shoehorned piece for the sake of having Greg sing either. This is a companion piece, fitted deliberately to mesh with Mussorgsky’s work.

Speaking of meshing with Mussorgsky’s work, there are a few original pieces interwoven seamlessly through the performance. The first side plays like one long piece, and while “The Sage” works on its own, it is integral to the experience. The concluding movement (not song, see what I did there?) is “Blues Variation,” which is essentially an extended jam with structure composed by the trio.

The enforced intermission while the record flips acts as a reset, as the band again launches into the central theme anchored by “The Promenade” before moving into what I like to think of as “The Baba Yaga Suite,” centred on “The Curse of Baba Yaga,” penned by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. While I really like “The Sage,” this is, to me, the central composition that connects the pieces together. It moves effortlessly into “The Great Gates of Kiev,” the closing song that resolves the connected elements and brings everything to a resounding climax. The audience reaction at the end tells you all you need to know. This was an experience.

The band’s encore, “Nutrocker,” is something you need to hear at least once. I’m not sure if the band is taking the piss or simply having a good time. It borders so closely on parody that I tend to think of it as the band’s way of letting people know they actually have a sense of humour and aren’t just a trio of pretentious musical wankers. The audience seemed to get it. I actually kind of love it, but I don’t need to hear it again for a while.

It’s been interesting to hear how this has gotten under my skin through repeated plays. I wasn’t really going to spend a lot of time with this one. I played it and thought it was cool, and really ambitious, but not exactly a casual listen. The band was giving it everything they had, and to not at least give them my attention seemed like a disservice.

I don’t know how often this will come down, but my goodness, this is pretty cool.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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