I’m partial to a bit of prog now and again, providing I’m in the right mood for it. However, this album falls into the category of having far too many notes for my taste, with the opening section of the 20 minute title track being a dizzying jazz freak out that’s all over the place. Apparently the keyboardist Keith Emerson wanted to write a piece in 5/4 time which just sounds like being clever for the sake of it, and it was so divisive that it nearly split the band.
It does calm down a little after the start, but there are other problems with this album. The general rule is that you shouldn’t judge something by its cover, but in this case it tells you a lot. The illustration of an armadillo crossed with a World War I style tank is exactly the sort of thing a teenage boy would doodle in the back of his physics textbook, and unfortunately the lyrics don’t rise much above this sort of adolescent level. Indeed, the track ‘The Only Way’ on side 2 features a line so egregiously awful that I almost switched the album off at that point. Your mileage may vary.
https://album.link/gb/i/1528525719
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