Raveiews from the Fringe
By HuggyDave
Hey there everyone, I've seen a lot of fantastic reviews on the site, and thought, as a professional cynic, to throw my cloven hoof of a writing hand into the arena. With pretty much the entirety of the reviews and columns being about rather heavy, rather recent and rather popular genres of rock and metal, I decided to dance around the fringe and talk about music from the wide and far reaching world of rock: Music you may not have heard about; music you may not have given the time of day too and of course music you didn't listen to for more than a few moments for fear it might cause your ear canals to implode like a pair of miniature pipe bombs.
Unfortunately for both you and I, the latter is firmly what we have today, as I bring you:
Love Beach – ELP (1979)
The Death of Prog Part 1: Oh yes, it's that personal!
Now, anyone who's known me for more than a few minutes will realise that I love progressive rock music. There is something utterly magical and compelling about music that takes apart all the conventions we know and hate about music and bring a vast array of influences back into relevance. However, it's easy to see the hate, and the genre is far from easy to get into.
Progressive rock is a musical genre that through the late 60s up until the mid 80s was home to one of the most diverse, intriguing and self-indulgent groups in the history of music. These were guys with a love for music who brought classical, baroque and jazz to the masses through the medium of rock! Nowadays it still exists, but in the late 70s something happened, a paradigm shifted and progressive rock no longer held the great high spot it once had in the public collective conscience. Now, a lot of people would say that it was punk rock that swept aside with a single spike wearing arm the pomp and bombast that came with prog. Others claim the genre stagnated and lost the novelty it brought in the 70s. I think it was something more sudden. In 1979 three albums from prog rock titans were released. All of which were so embarrassment and contemptible that they killed all mainstream credibility left for the genre and forced its fans underground, communing in secret about Asia and the future of music as it stumbled into the mechanical 80s. For two of the bands we will discuss next, this was just endemic of the personal problems suffered by a band after a decade in the limelight; their difficulties metamorphosing into vinyl. And then we have to get onto ELP. Oh this is going to be fun.
ELP is essentially the sour memory a lot of people instantly think of when you tell them about prog rock. Essentially the ludicrousness, bombasity, pretension and utter unlistenability that a lot of people associate with the genre is usually accompanied by them citing an ELP record. They're usually akin to Disco as something that people point to, snort at and mockingly ask “How the hell could anyone buy that!?”
Well here's your answer Mr Snorty!
ELP was essentially the supergroup of the 1970s, formed by the three biggest and baddest names of early prog and at one point was going to be fronted by none other than Jimmy Hendrix! You had Keith Emerson, the manic keyboardist behind The Nice (known for doing that instrumental cover of America from West Side Story); Greg Lake, the soulful voice behind the first two King Crimson albums (also known as the two best ones); and Carl Palmer, an insanely fast drummer who worked with both psychedelic forerunners Atomic Rooster and the utterly insane Crazy World of Arthur Brown. It sounded like a killer prospect, and initially it was, their first few albums being met with powerfully mixed reviews. The early albums were usually diverse enough to have something everyone would like, in particular the first album, which I consider a classic of prog. However, things turned sour about the mid point of the 70s, which was probably demonstrated the best with Works Volume 1, an album which gave an entire lp side to each member and the final side to their combined stuff. The issue was of course, that Lake and Emerson were of very different schools of music and never ever agreed on ELP's direction, which regretfully led to a lot of Lake's talents being vastly underused. After Works Volume 2, which was made up entirely of unused takes from the first Works album, they had one left to produce, with the slight problem that they hated each other. What kind of music would come from such stress?
Listening to the results, I advise you to never ever ever fall out with your band if you want to make a good record guys!
Anyways, everything about Love Beach screams at you to flee as far as possible to an inland country where true love is forbidden to avoid this waste. Right from the name. Love Beach. Say that to yourself at home, and ask seriously to yourself if it gives the image of pretension, intelligence and musicianship. If you answered yes, then gaze into the abyss of wrongness that the album cover posits:
Gee, sure is Bee Gees around here.
In any case, lots of great albums have terrible covers I hear you cry, and I can't entirely argue with you. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of Love Beach is in the ear pain you suffer afterwards. It is really difficult to start with the general issues with the album. Like most ELP albums, the production is utterly messed up, and the overreaching emphasis of Emerson's Moog synth preset is as immensely distracting as it is immensely painful. I know I'll get a lot of hate for this but Emerson wastes his talent, and has wasted his talent ever since he set his synths to the most ear damaging of pitches and then stab knives into then to record the digital cries of pain. Having said that, in this album he doesn't rely on his usual tricks of breaking his expensive fragile equipment and instead just uses a piano and a presumably digital synth on its most screechy preset. On the complete other end, Greg Lake actually sings through the entire album which is as brilliant as it is utterly sad that it took them until ELP's last and worst album for them to utilise Lake more. It is also deeply sad that they wasted his talents on such utterly painful lyrics as the vapid All I want is You and the deeply disturbing Taste of My Love. Palmer is as good as ever but since he was always the lukewarm water between Emerson's fire and Lake's ice, this is hardly surprising.
The influences they seemed to have adopted here come primarily from Disco, and much like the worst of disco that people remember, the entirety of the songs on the first side have no weight, dodgy rhythm, and are utterly vacuous in tone; proof positive that utterly wretched love songs are not just a product of the noughties. The synth strings often used by Emerson to utterly kill all your old favourites strike again here, making even the slightly less shite 20 minute Memoirs of an Officer and a Gentleman sound like it belongs in an fantasy video game from the early 1990s.
Thematically, the album is about love. Not about broken hearts or the balance between the beauty of love and the hideousness of hate. Just about love. On a beach. The songs don't connect into one concept, although you could argue that the first side could also easily be called Memoirs from the Copacabana. All I Want is You is the vapid desperate “we want a single from this dreck” song, which is simply a collection of nice loving sentiments from a man flying on “flight 112” to tell his love that all he wants is her. I don't want to call it simplistic, but the bridge appears to be taken from Spot the Dog goes on Holiday or something:
I'm on flight 112
The Airport's straight ahead
Runway lights in blue and red
I'm nearly home, nearly home
From a prog band, and the band that wrote such nonsensical genius as Tarkus, this could be considered quite the step down. This is followed by the somewhat less sentimental “Love Beach” which I suppose if All I want is You is the awkward courting song, this is the drunken lusting foreplay tune, with the refrain of “Gonna make love to you on Love Beach” sounding far seedier than perhaps it was intended, especially since it looks like it was saving all its disgusting sex lyrics for “Taste of my Love”, a song that appears to crib lines from Aerosmith but Greg Lake's melodic delivery makes it actually sound too sincere which as a consequence makes it sound more creepy than funny. ELP have taken themselves incredibly seriously, it's part of the reason how they got away with all the stupid rock star things they did. The issue though is that they don't and never have played straight rock and roll, which is what the lyrics borrow heavily from.
The Gambler continues their line of cringe worthy playboy songs, but despite the utterly ludicrous Sonic and Knuckles synth bass is probably one of the better songs on the album, if only because they at least hide the innuendo a bit better than Love Beach did, and the ludicrously plastic nature of the music actually helps the metaphor of a sleazy playboy gambler who's more careful about the mood of his women than of anything else because it's the one thing you can't gamble on! See, if this was any other band, it might of worked. A lot of these songs (alright, not All I want is You. Fuck that song) may have worked if it wasn't the high and mighty prog supergroup Emerson Lake and Palmer doing it. It seems that to ELP experimentation meant a step backwards.
For You is the last track on side A, and the last of the Club Tropicana beach disco tracks, the natural climax to the earlier seedier songs, the awkward morning after a night of hedonism and sex with strangers. Again, like the gambler this is a song that would work were it not actually Greg Lake singing it and without the Keith Emerson wailing car alarm in the background distracting. It's a far more regretful love that forms the central pillar of this song, as the narrator attempts to rationalise his nights of passion on Love Beach as true love that he wished could be realised if it weren't for her stoic rejection, and begging her to help him find meaning and happiness in a world of madness and sadness, ending with the bitter refrain “next time you fall in love, don't do it for you.”
Side B is clearly the bit that Keith Emerson, who produced the album (big shocker given the blaring keyboards) cared about, as it contains only the instrumental Canario and the 20 minute long Memoirs of an Officer and a Gentleman. Both are far more standard Elp fare, though I leave it as a thought experiment for you whether that's good or bad. Needless to say they were the saving grace of the song. But after 25 minutes of disco-prog even the relative lyrical excellence of Memoirs feels empty and unrewarding, as if the entire first side was a test and even if you survive it the reward is nowhere near satisfying enough. Compared to Karn Evil 9 and Tarkus it's more sane, character driven and sombre, which works really against it considering the people behind it, and even the heartfelt vocals and beautiful piano solo in the middle struggle to save it.
This is an album that I really feel quite angry about having listened through it again. It's not just that it's a bad album; it's not bad in that wonderfully perverse way things like Nitro or Europe excluding The Final Countdown. It's really profoundly mean spirited in the kind of way that is anathema to excellent music, mean spirited at itself as opposed to at the world the music attempts to portray and enrapture. It's a group of musicans that hate each other and could do so much better but deliberately didn't to spite themselves. Peter Sinfield co-wrote all the lyrics! Peter Sinfield! Possibly the greatest lyricist of this and the previous generation wrote All I want is You! It's deeply sad that his next gig writing notorious pop cheeseball Land of Make Believe by Eurovision runner up Bucks Fizz was a step up! ELP would never get their groove back and would end up making even worse albums first with Black Sabbath drummer Cozy Powell, then Carl Palmer was part of the first incarnation of that other failed supergroup Asia! Then they returned to make two even worse albums than Love Beach! It's amazing how far they fell and I may have to cover that at some point. However, Love Beach was their most damaging contribution to music, and was the collapse of the first pillar of prog, and then there were two...
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