Emerson Lake & Palmer

Brain Salad Surgery - 1973

Released in november 1973, Emerson Lake & Palmer's fifth album and out of all their efforts, Brain Salad Surgery boasts the best production quality and use of available technology at that time out of any of their albums, as by this point they were in full stride as a popular and commercial force who could afford it. Then, of course, there's the magnificent H.R. Giger cover, a nightmarish icon of humanity literally embedded within technology. Musically, this album contains some of the best work they ever achieved as a unit, though offset by a few cracks in the paint, I am prevented from calling it their most

consistent effort overall (a title I would probably afford to their previous album, Trilogy).

Brain Salad Surgery starts off with a stately cathedral rock re-working of the British hymn "Jerusalem," then swings directly into a mind-bending adaptation of Argentinian composer Albert Ginastera's "Tocatta Concertata (Presto)," taken from his Piano Concerto No. 1. Adorned with needle-sharp Moog and grating Hammond nipping at your nose, this mechanistic tarantella is the perfect audio complement to Giger's painting. Emerson adapted many classical pieces both for the whole unit and in his solo spots, but "Tocatta" is the best one by a long shot. In its comparative obscurity and use of dissonance, I feel this is the kind of stuff that they should have attempted more often. I can see why Ginastera would have been impressed upon hearing this electronic transformation of his music.

The album's masterpiece is "Karn Evil 9," which consists of three 'Impressions,' the first of which is further subdivided into two parts. The first Impression gets things off to a strong start, and by the time you get to "Part 2" of the song, the most frequently played ELP song on the radio nowadays, you are hearing the peak of a band successfully balancing their unique rock virtuosity with the capacity for popular appeal. The entirely instrumental second Impression is another apex track. Note to those who feel compelled to engage in 'Wakeman versus Emerson: Who's Better?' pissing matches ("better" almost always being a synonym for technical ability): I've never heard Rick Wakeman compose anything as sophisticated or play anything even closely as technically demanding as what is represented here. The third and final Impression is the least of the three, not so much musically, but in terms of carrying an awkward man versus omnipotent computer narrative. Still, the use of the primitive sequencer and rapid cyclical channeling that closes the piece out is a legendary album ending.

For most fans, possibly excepting the 80s album they made with Cozy Powell substituting for Palmer, Brain Salad Surgery was this band's final hurrah. To sum up: This one's got a lot of power/ it'll never sour/you'll want to take a shower!