ELP's live Pictures At An Exhibition and studio recorded Brain Salad Surgery are polar opposites to me but both are incredibly engaging, and both spotted with a little bit of filler. PaaE's showcase is, to use the phrase, a loose interpretation of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition with Karn Evil 9 being the musical tour de force of BBS.
Both are incredible to me and I jump back forth between them as favorites. (With Tarkus thrown in, sometimes.)
Which do you prefer?
Last edited by StevegSr; 03-29-2016 at 07:03 PM.
To be or not to be? That is the point. - Harry Nilsson.
Ugh. So different, I love both equally for different reasons.
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Pictures. Although my favorite part may be The Sage/Old castle/Blues variation section.
BSS hands down for me. I almost never go to Pictures. BSS is just bliss to my ears.
No show on earth like BSS live in the 70s... What a spectacle!
Still alive and well...
Yeah, it's not even close for me. I LIKE Pictures, but BSS is mind blowing.Originally Posted by gpeccary
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BabaYaga/Great Gates suite puts BSS to shame for me. Never could get into BSS, or anything after, just too haphazard. Trilogy album, and song, was great though.
I love Brain and always have - their finest hour, IMO. And on the other hand I think Pictures pretty much represents everything I've *never* been able to enjoy about the "symphonic" rock idiom.
"Improvisation is not an excuse for musical laziness" - Fred Frith
"[...] things that we never dreamed of doing in Crimson or in any band that I've been in," - Tony Levin speaking of SGM
Brain Salad Surgery. This is one of the milestone albums of prog. PaaE is lovely, but not on par with BSS level.
Brain Salad Surgery, no contestant. Yes, some songs on that album were the first I heard from ELP, though it was not my first ELP. My collection started with Welcome back my friends...
pictures
Actually, I think KE9 is wayayayay over long...
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
^^^THIS!
Hm. It's a three part piece, and they are fully disparate. You can easily discern them and execute them separately. Indeed I find that the whole piece works better this way.
"Improvisation is not an excuse for musical laziness" - Fred Frith
"[...] things that we never dreamed of doing in Crimson or in any band that I've been in," - Tony Levin speaking of SGM
Pictures never really grabbed me, and I've tried. BSS is their masterpiece.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
BSS for me.
Very well done and some passages border on unbelievable technical ability.
Pictures is a cool project -- unique.
Best suited for the orchestra however..................such a powerful presentation from Mussorgsky.
BSS for me, one of my favorite albums of all time.
I like Pictures a lot, probably more now than back in the day when I found it all a bit too overblown. I now think side 1 is just about perfect, particularly the Sage/Old Castle/Blues variation section, which is uber-killer! I still think parts of side 2 get a bit overblown, particularly the ending, but there's much to like here as well. This is one of the best recorded and performed live albums I've ever heard, particularly from the 70s. I've always wondered if it got some studio doctoring, but a past thread here pretty much dispelled that speculation. So it stands as a great testament to how great ELP could be live, perhaps their greatest in this regard.
But for me, BSS is the jewel in the crown. Not a second of "filler" on that album in my opinion. They could have left Benny or SYTMO off and had a basically 40 minute LP. They wanted those songs there, and for me, they work beautifully, "get me a ladder" and all.
Bill
BSS by a small margin, although it's chalk and cheese really. One is a carefully constructed studio album and the other a rip roaring live recording, but they're both great on their own terms. I love the raucous atmosphere on Pictures with several thousand screaming Geordies sounding like a football crowd. Is it true (sure I read it somewhere) that they used a technique called 'zagging' on BSS that slightly speeds up recordings? Greg's voice does sound a bit higher pitched than normal. Keith later said he had to transcribe the whole piece to a lower key for live renditions after Greg decided his voice had got lower. So was it zagging or Greg's voice change that made the Welcome Back version sound so different? Keith did often seem to blame Greg for things!
An odd pairing, two completely different outings. One raw live offering with improv, the other a thickly produced studio album. If anything it shows each ELP album offered something of a different experience. There was never a Tarkus Part 2, or a feeling of "more of the same".
As way stated above, love both for different reasons. I wish PaaE was recorded/mixed/mastered better...that would go a long way in upping its appeal-potential as it is a very unique thing for a rock band to tackle and they, for the most part, nailed it.
I actually prefer the re-recorded Pictures at an Exhibition. Sounds great in 5:1
Love them both but BSS is ELP at their finest.
The Prog Corner
pictures but both are top 10 for me
Really? I always thought PAAE sounded fantastic! Very live, present, in-your-face. Brain Salad Surgery, OTOH, always had a bit of a cluttered, cloudy feel to me, probably the result of ten million overdubs. Of course, the music itself is unbeatable, desert-island-choice stuff.
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The studio effect that you are referring to is quite old and is known as vari-speed, which is the ability to playback a recording at a slightly faster or slower rate in order to alter the pitch of the music, usually by a semi tone. Any faster or slower would sound cartoonish. Faster tape vari-speed is evidenced in the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's song "When I'm Sixty Four." The dance hall like music was actually played at a faster speed. Only McCartney's vocal's were recorded a tad slower and then sped up in order to make him sound like a young teenager. The flip of this would be the second half of "Strawberry Fields Forever" which is a slowed down edit (by a half step) from a faster but better take. The slowing effect evokes a dream like quality to the music.
IMHO, I believe that ELP used a bit of varispeed enhancement on KE9, but it does not distract from the song's brilliance or the group's ability to perform the song. It was simply a standard recording studio enhancement of the day. And it's what makes BBS all the more opposite of PaaE, IMHO.
To be or not to be? That is the point. - Harry Nilsson.
Indeed. BSS is their creative peak. Some don't like the sound of the album; for me it's part of this album's appeal, such a unique mix and production that sounds like no other album I've heard. I think by the end of 'Karn Evil 9', there's almost a sense of 'where can we go from here'. After all, it essentially took 4 years to follow it up. The 1st Impression in particular is the sound of a band at the absolute peak of their powers.
'Toccata' is perhaps their most extreme recording...I have to say it took a while longer for me to get into it. But I now find it one of their finest achievements, with Palmer and Emerson at their best. I also underrated Lake's input until I saw the CalJam performance of this song, there's some fiendishly difficult playing from him in this!
Their interpretation of 'Jerusalem' has a kind of stirring, anthemic yet bittersweet quality. 'Still You Turn Me On' is perfectly placed, a powerful ballad performance that also offers breathing space.
The only questionable moment is 'Benny The Bouncer'. (Well, there's also the infamously clunky 'ladder' lyric!) I like some of the keyboard playing but I don't like the way Lake sings it. I don't skip past it as at least it's short.
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