Track Listing

1. Jerusalem
2. Toccata
3. Still...You Turn Me On
4. Benny The Bouncer
5. Karn Evil 9
6. Brain Salad Surgery
7. When The Apple Blossoms Bloom In The Windmills Of Your Mind I'll Be Your Valentine
8. Excerpts From Brain Salad Surgery Flexi Disc

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2643 in Music
• Released on: 2008-02-26
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 58 minutes

Customer Reviews

A new clear dawn with Emerson, Lake & Palmer at their best
This 1973 ELP album with the original painting by H. R. Giger is one of the great covers of all time and if you really pay attention to the details in the artwork you can figure out what "Brain Salad Surgery" means in British slang terms. For me this is the best album by the Progressive (nee Classical) Rock Power Trio. The synthesizer-saturated sound that dominated "Tarkus" has been toned down considerably to great effect, which you can tell immediately with the opening organ chords of Keith Emerson's organ on "Jerusalem," the best-known Anglican hymn. "Toccata," an adaptation of the 4th Movement of Ginastera's 1st Piano Concerto features an impressive percussion movement from Carl Palmer. "Still...You Turn Me On" is Greg Lake's best composition since "Lucky Man," and you can only wish his work had not always been so overshadowed by Emerson's pyrotechnics on the keyboard. "Benny the Bouncer" is another one of those annoying little honky tonk ditties that ELP was so enamored of for some reason that passeth understanding (cf. "The Sheriff").

The highlight of the album is the "Karn Evil 9" Suite, which seems to me to be a nice synthesis of what the group had gone for in earlier albums with the "Tarkus" Suite and "The Endless Enigma," although more like the latter of that particular pair in terms of employing the forms of classical composition. The First Impression offered the line that came to sum up the group's performance, "Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends," although you find yourself wishing they had used computer magic to get rid of the fade out/fade in that we had to endure on vinyl when we flipped sides of the record. The Second Impression is arguably their finest instrumental track while the Third Impression brings the album full circle, offering a hymn for the new clear dawn. To make this album perfect all you have to do is program your CD player to skip the fourth track and you eliminate the one sound bump.

Still WOW!!!

The early to mid seventies were an incredible time in terms of quality music releases and I'm really glad I was around at the time... Although still at school, I saved my pocket money and collected Christmas and Birthday "gift/record" tokens to buy some of these LP's. I remember buying this on its release at W H Smiths in Aylesbury High Street and rushing home on the bus to play it...

The music presented here shows just how good the three members of ELP are. From "Jerusalem" to the way out "Toccata" (Tangerine Dream's "Phaedra" hadn't been released at that point), then on to a good acoustic song by Greg Lake, a bit of fun (Benny The Bouncer) to the awsome "Karn Evil 9".

You'd think that, by now, the tracks here would sound dated, pretentious and OTT, but, by and large, they don't really. The power and impact hasn't diminished in the last thirty five years or so and the album as a whole is still hugely enjoyable.

I seem to remember reading that the band were playing with a strange sounding microphone, that gave a rather tin plated "sssound" to everything. The original CD issue (mine was on Atlantic) filtered this right out, the result being dull, muffled and thick sounding - NOT what my original LP sounded like - . The mid nineties saw ELP's work re-released and this album was restored to its original glory (better, as the LP suffered from bad (noisy) vinyl in the early years.

I see now that some extra's have been added recently. I hope the album "proper" hasn't been tinkered with in the process, as the overall clarity of the original recording is good by contemporary music standards and should stand as an example to the cluttered, squashed and compressed "noise" we are subjected to by most new bands today, in an age of superior digital technology (and CD players) far better than was generally available twenty years ago.....

the best of ELP
If you only buy one ELP album, it has to be this or 'Pictures...'
Choose BSS for its polish, darkness, ambition. Choose 'Pictures...' for its energy and virtuosity. BSS's strongest tracks - 'Toccata', and the Karn Evil 9 set - has a brooding, black glamour. Keith Emerson's synthesizer and Hammond technique is well integrated, so that musicality isn't sacrificed in order to show off his ability. Carl Palmers versatile percussion is also heavily 'treated' to produce a clean, uniform sound, and Greg Lake's voice is well placed in the mix, so that the whole sound of the album is satisfyingly seamless. The only jarring note is the honky-tonk of 'Benny the Bouncer', which doesn't quite fit with the bleak futurism of the rest. The cover artwork - an idealised female image overgrown by a grim, metallic death's head - signifies exactly what you will find inside.