Emerson, Lake & Palmer

I like them, but how many opportunities have these wasted, so many good ideas, three phenomena (especially Keith Emerson, rightly on the podium of the best rock keyboardists), yet never able to blend them well, often resulting in being long-winded, filler-heavy, and pretentious, with virtuosity that is often unnecessary and frankly boring. The debut is a nice little disk (ruined by some boring moments and the long tracks that suffer from prolixity), Tarkus is one of the albums that disappointed me the most, incredibly lengthy, with a suite that really should have lasted 15 minutes instead of 2 (thank God for Lake who saves everything in the shorter distances), Trilogy is a good album, and that big record of Brain Salad Surgery (not a masterpiece, thanks to Benny The Bouncier). I give it 3/5 because they do have technical abilities that cannot be overlooked, and for better or for worse they have also made history (albeit in small bursts). It’s just that you don’t make history with technique; you make history with compositions, with the ideal intuition to create masterpieces, what a shame...