Hang On To A Dream/My Back Pages/Third Movement Pathetique/America (2nd Amendment)
Elegy was the final release from the progressive band Nice after they has split up. Dismissed as self indulgent and boring it is likely to appeal only to hard core fans of Keith Emerson’s bombastic ambitions. (UK:5)
“This was a posthumously released final LP consisting of unused live tracks and a couple of studio rejects including an awkward rendition of Bob Dylan's My Back Pages. They really scraped the bottom of the barrel for this one.”
“The last and the most self-indulgent Nice album, recommended only for huge Emerson fans.”
“Mostly boring live tracks from 1969, although if you are in the right mood, hard core fans of this band might be able to endure some of this.”
“Elegy represents everything bad about them. Unspeakably pretentious and overblown, nobody has ever sounded so puffed up and confident about something so totally useless. These songs are simplistic and go nowhere.”
“It's a live album divided roughly equally between four long tracks - all covers but of course Keith Emerson does stuff to them. My favourite is Hang On To A Dream which features a long jazzy piano workout with rather non-jazzy hypnotic bass underpinning. There are some catchy diversions into a more honky-tonk style. America is their cover of the West Side Story theme, and perhaps generally acknowledged as the band's greatest achievement. The composer Leonard Bernstein was so disgusted he successfully prevented them from playing it in the US. The rest of the album is pretty much long on bombast and short on brilliance.”
“The version of America is everything. As a kid listening to this album for the first time, I couldn’t imagine how he was getting those sounds out of the organ. I assumed he had some sort of moog involved. When a friend pointed out that on stage synths didn’t exist at the time this was recorded, I realized Keith's genius. There’s a fire and rage is his early playing that is as wicked as Hendrix.”
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