Emerson, Lake & Palmer's most successful and well-realized album (after their first), and their most ambitious as a group, as well as their loudest,
Brain Salad Surgery was also the most steeped in electronic sounds of any of their records. The main focus, thanks to the three-part "Karn Evil 9," is sci-fi rock, approached with a volume and vengeance that stretched the art rock audience's tolerance to its outer limit, but also managed to appeal to the metal audience in ways that little of
Trilogy did. Indeed, "Karn Evil 9" is the piece and the place where
Keith Emerson and his keyboards finally matched in both music and flamboyance the larger-than-life guitar sound of
Jimi Hendrix. This also marked the point in the group's history in which they brought in their first outside creative hand, in the guise of ex-
King Crimson lyricist
Pete Sinfield. He'd been shopping around his first solo album and was invited onto the trio's new Manticore label, and also asked in to this project as
Lake's abilities as a lyricist didn't seem quite up to the 20-minute "Karn Evil 9" epic that
Emerson had created as an instrumental.
Sinfield's resulting lyrics for "Karn Evil 9: First Impression" and "Karn Evil 9: Third Impression," while not up to the standard of his best
Crimson work, were better than anything the group had to work with previously -- he was also responsible for
Emerson's choice of title, persuading the keyboardist that the music he'd come up with was more evocative of a carnival and fantasy than the pure science fiction concept that
Emerson had started with. And
Greg Lake pulled out all the stops with his heaviest singing voice in handling them, coming off a bit like
Peter Gabriel in the process. And amid
Carl Palmer's prodigious drumming, it was all a showcase for
Emerson, who employed more keyboards and more sounds here -- including electronic voices -- than had previously been heard on one of their records. The songs (except for the light-hearted throwaway "Benny the Bouncer") are also among their best work -- the group's arrangement of Sir Charles Hubert Parry's setting of
William Blake's "Jerusalem" manages to be reverent yet rocking (a combination that got it banned by the BBC for potential "blasphemy"), while
Emerson's adaptation of
Alberto Ginastera's music in "Tocatta" outstrips even "The Barbarian" and "Knife Edge" from the first album as a distinctive and rewarding reinterpretation of a piece of serious music. Lake's "Still...You Turn Me On," the album's obligatory acoustic number, was his last great ballad with the group, possessing a melody and arrangement sufficiently pretty to forgive the presence of the rhyming triplet "everyday a little sadder/a little madder/someone get me a ladder." And the sound quality was stunning, and the whole album represented a high point that the trio would never again achieve, or even aspire to -- after this, each member started to go his own way in terms of creativity and music. ~ Bruce Eder