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 , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...

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