The Keith Emerson Band is
Emerson's first self-assured musical statement since the legendary trio of
Emerson, Lake & Palmer last disbanded in the mid-'90s. It marks a fresh start for one of the world's most admired keyboard wizards, in which he regains the musical focus his fans had missed. A few years into the new millennium,
Emerson met
Marc Bonilla, and the two hit it off so well that his motivation to write new compositions returned; the pair agreed to dive into the sounds that distinguished ELP in their prime. That objective was realized with the 35-minute opus "The House of Ocean Born Mary" opening the album. The once-familiar array of sounds, including the Hammond organ, the Moog synthesizer, the grand piano, and the pipe organ appear almost as a showcase during the opening part of this first track, and remain present in their interplay throughout the album. Based on a ghost story familiar to both
Bonilla and
Emerson, the song is short on solid narrative, and the lyrics leave much to the listener's imagination.
Emerson instead lets the music itself do the talking, as he takes listeners through a landscape of sounds and ideas, leading them into the more evened-out plateaus of songs written and sung by
Bonilla, the latter of whom excellently guides
Emerson back to form here with a voice as fine and elegant as two other great vocalists of the genre:
John Wetton and even
Greg Lake, to some extent.
Bonilla's contributions gently take the main piece down to the simpler quality of music that many a progressive star of the '70s succumbed to in the '80s (
Wetton's band
Asia being a typically embarrassing example) without going too far down. Still, things work out very well here, not least thanks to the grand instrumental "Finale" of "The House of Ocean Born Mary." The rest of the album even includes more echoes from the days of
ELP: an adoption of a piece by composer
Alberto Ginastera, "Malambo," which, far from the sinister and edgy "Tocatta," is more of a sprightly piece featuring
Emerson's piano acrobatics. There’s also a familiar stopover in the honky tonk "Gametime," with some impressive rhyming by
Bonilla. That and the
Bonilla/
Emerson-penned song "The Art of Falling Down" show that
Bonilla can be a better lyricist than seemed probable from the evidence in the opening piece, and the flexible jazz-tinged dynamics of this song go even further in suggesting that there is quite a bit more potential in this partnership. ~ Alan Severa