Emerson, Lake & Palmer Album: “Black Moon”

Black Moon...ELP's comeback album in 1992 may not have been a complete return to the early albums such as Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery but netherless Black Moon is a ELP album for the 90's.

The title track and Paper Blood are among the best songs on the album. The lyrics are very much about today's world and are drivin home with the powerful sound ELP has long been known for.

While Greg Lake's voice has deepened a bit over the years, he still has a very powerful voice and can still sing with grace and force. The ballads Affairs Of The Heart and Footprints in The Snow are touching and beautiful to listen to.

The instrumentals Romeo and Juliet and Close To Home continue to show ELP's vast musical talents. Keith Emerson's amazingly diverse and and complex keyboard work is still a delight to listen to and Carl Palmer's drumming is rock solid and continues to show a nice touch with his percussion playing.

There aren't any epic sized songs here but this a great album netherless. A most welcomed return for...Emerson...Lake...& Palmer!

"Live at the Royal Albert Hall" (1993) was decent, and "In the Hot Seat" (1994) plain reeked. In lieu of ELP's regrouping during the 1990's, "Black Moon" is by far their best-sounding album of this decade. Every track, except "Romeo & Juliet", continues to strike deep accord with my ears! "Changing States", "Farewell to Arms", "Paper Blood", and "Better Days" are my personal favorites; I will never become bored listening to each of their spry keyboard melodies from the ever-quirky Keith Emerson! When I first purchased the album in 1992, I barely recognized Greg Lake's distinct vocals, but that's just the plain result of a 13-year hiatus! Even with age, Greg, Keith, and Carl sound fabulous as ever on "Black Moon"! This CD definitely compensates for the lackluster dross played in "Love Beach" (1978).

Emerson, Lake and Palmer was the first Progressive Rock supergroup, but the glory days are over and the magic is gone when they released this 1992 album, their first studio effort in a dozen years. It is not a question of their technical proficiency, because Keith Emerson remains my favorite keyboard artist and is in fine form, as he shows on "Changing States" and the piano solo on "Close to Home" (this was a few years before hand surgery affected his playing ability). However, from the start of this album with the title song and "Paper Blood" it is clear that these are much simpler songs than we recall from the past, with few bursts of the wonderful complexity for which ELP was rightly known. For me there is also the concern over the aging of Greg Lake's voice, which is really unrecognizable. In the days of my youth that was the voice that I most wanted to have (e.g., the live version of "Lucky Man" on "Welcome Back My Friends"); but instead of my voice becoming more like his it is the other way around, which is not a good thing. That is an admittedly personal problem, but on the professional level Lake is doing less of the songwriting than before and the best track on the album is the adaptation of the classical piece "The Dance of the Knights" from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. "Footprints in the Snow" is a minor Lake composition at best, which is another disappointment. ELP was one of my favorite all-time groups, and hearing them play lesser songs without the fire that made them famous, is just another sign that we are all growing old.

Pretty good record, if a bit boring in places ... "Paper Blood" has a verse that is a revamp of the verse of "Money Talks", a song he and Geoff Downes did in the Ride The Tiger project .. "Paper Blood" is a more well-rounded song, than the aforementioned ... The title track is kinda boring ... there are some other catchy songs, here and there ... "Affairs Of the Heart", a tune he did with Geoff Downes, which I guess Keith did the keyboards on here to make it an ELP song (with some light percussion from Carl toward the end) - is a great, haunting song. "No one is too smart, in affairs of the heart ..." .. More true words may never have been sung. It's a kind of simple mid-range/low vocal, but Greg sings it with such conviction you believe it has just happened to him. That's my pick of best song on the album. The ELPowell album is a better record than this; the main issue is it just drags, in places ... fails to be interesting. Greg has said in a couple interviews, in the '000s that the producer at the time was involved too much with the direction the album took, and the chemistry was not the same as on albums like Trilogy and Brain Salad Surgery. Well on ELPowell they had a producer and that album had great chemistry, as far as I'm concerned .. But one can see where Greg is coming from. In his 60s now, I would think it's got to burn him up how on radio today (and on videos, OMG, on videos) the young people are subjected to these paper stars, (Rihanna, Lady gaga, Nicki Manaj, Black Eyed Peas ... I could go on), and told 'THIS IS COOL' by the music media ... When in the mid-70s and one record in the 80s he and his band made real music for a music industry who wanted real music. Everybody liked "Touch and Go", and thought it was cool .... It's indeed a different age, and time will see if music, as a whole can ever possibly recover.

Anyway good album, though not their best .. 76%

ELP's 1992 album "Black Moon", has been updated with great sound, the music shines through. Nice liner notes in this great package. If your an ELP fan, get these 2011 re-masters.