(100) Days of Soundtrack: #6 – Emerson Lake and Palmer – Tarkus

With the recent passing of Keith Emerson, there are bound to be many tributes from the people who loved his music. Prog fans will wax nostalgic about the first ELP album they heard and what it meant to them. Classic Rock enthusiasts will recall the impact of the supergroup. For my part, I will review an album I’ve never heard.

If I’m to review Emerson Lake and Palmer, though, Tarkus is the only choice. It’s a classic of their catalog, for starters, with a sprawling title suite, but it’s also not Brain Salad Surgery. That one, I do not remember well, but I know I’ve heard it before. Tarkus has no similar blemish. What it does have is a lovely illustration of an armadillo as a tank. Sold!

It is interesting how the titular focal point feels exactly like the progressive rock template. It hits on all manner of standard issue prog technique: shifting irregular time signatures, brief runs repeated, then moved up the scale, distinctive “movements” stitched together into one whole, lyrics which sound more like speculative science-fiction than music. As such, it is more of an interesting experience to take in as opposed to a song to embrace as a favorite. In the same way that a symphony or an opera would have its highlights that are often broken out from the whole to represent the whole, there are bits that stand out as opposed to a memorable whole. We think of “Ode to Joy” when we think of Beethoven’s 9th, and when I think of “Tarkus,” I will forever think of the robot-duck section starting right before the 17 minute mark, or how the intro captured the essence of a tank-armadillo.

The back half, six tracks that fall well short of the total length of “Tarkus,” is a different tank-armadillo altogether, in that it is a bit of a Frankenstein. I once watched Yngwie Malmsteen attempt to teach guitar, and when trying to slow down his roll, he stumbled over his fingering, despite his impressive speed and technique. ELP seem to do the same for length. Without an airy, leisurely third third of an hour to sprawl across, the songs seem to suffer. I do love the music box sections of “Bitches Crystal,” but the track has a sense of trying to wear a button-down shirt that is just a bit snug around the belly. It seems just a little cramped. Maybe only “A Time and a Place,” as classic 70s rock as one can get, truly feels comfortable, although, along with “Infinite Space (Conclusion),” the three tracks are all varying degrees of successful.

Less successful are the more straighforward tracks which begin and end the second side. “Jeremy Bender” has pleasant enough piano anchoring it, but it feels out of place and twee, having nothing to do with anything else on the album until the final track, which is out of place for similar but different reasons. “Are You Ready, Eddy?” is particularly strange. “Are you ready to rock and roll?” it asks, and I cannot help but wonder why this question is being asked to Eddy at the very last song, when if Eddy was to say “yes!” he would be met with “too bad, the album’s over.”  It’s not inherently bad… it is a nothing-special callback to an earlier rock and roll era, albeit with prog flourishes (its piano solo quotes classical motifs before devolving into intentional dischord), but it does that well. While these tracks are just out of place and baffling for it, “The Only Way (Hymn)” is a fairly easy pick for worst of the litter. It ends up making the connection between prog and classical in the most heavy-handed way possible. Even putting the word “Hymn” in the title, as if we couldn’t make the connection, hammers home the influences. Of course, in this era, using religious terminology like “hymn” means the track is either up-with-people humanism or the first awkward attempts at questioning religion in popular culture. This one hits both targets, and it suffers for it. Its biggest sin is being dull, especially with 45 years of distance from the time it was penned, but it also has a cringeworthy line asking of God “how could he lose/six million Jews?” While the Holocaust certainly does make a good case for the nonexistence of a merciful God who loves us and protects us, the line comes out of nowhere, is never really articulated on, and crashes down as a silly couplet before making one feel awkward about the whole affair when the meaning clicks. And while we’re talking about feeling awkward, did “fisting” mean something different in the early 70s? Because I’m not sure I feel comfortable with what Jeremy Bender has been doing with nuns.

As an album, this must have been a little less jarring. It’s almost like a split-EP, with side A devoted to a meandering but ultimately cohesive rock-symphony, and the B-side seeming to come from a fully different 70s rock band. The ups and downs of that second half could be taken in without having already spent oneself on 20 minutes of calculated experimentation. It’s also clear, though, that it would have been far more groundbreaking. With the capacity of one side of an album being limited at best, pushing one track toward that limit was obviously not on the minds of most musicians. Hearing the album now, there’s no shortage of callbacks in modern prog. Almost every passage feels like a calling card of other epics of the genre. It’s hard to appreciate that importance looking back, because the inspiration is what your experience was exposed to first, but it’s also hard to ignore. It’s hard for me to say how well it’s all held up, but it’s obvious why it’s been held up as an example in the first place.