This dark edge is especially prevalent in the first half of the album, which is great enough to prompt me to give this album a high rating despite that the second half only strikes me as pretty good. "Flower King of Flies," which opens the album, starts off as a shuffling psychedelic ballad that can't help but remind me a bit of "(Listen to the) Flower People," but it quickly adopts a darker guise once Emerson's keys start flickering in the background, and the track becomes rather intense in the instrumental passage between instances of the chorus. The Hendrix-y jams are a lot of fun as well. Jackson's vocals, as would become the standard, aren't great here, but the parts where he sings solo are kept slightly quiet, and the louder moments hide him behind a thick wall of harmonies. O'List takes over on vocals in the following title track, and he isn't really an improvement, but the main features of that song, namely the playful melody repeatedly sung by the backing vocals and the bouncy harpsichord parts, more than compensate, and I enjoy the track a lot. Then there's "Bonnie K," which reminds me in all sorts of ways of the kinds of Hendrix-y rockers that Procol Harum would do back before Robin Trower left the band (granted, a lot of them would happen after this album, but my point is that The Nice and Procol Harum were of a similar mind in regard to rockers of this kind); Jackson works as kind of a poor-man's Gary Brooker in his vocals, Emerson's keyboards are full of life and energy, and O'List's guitars rawk out in the best way that pre-Zeppelin 60s hard rock could offer.

But really, all of this is just a warmup for "Rondo." Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo à la Turk" was an established jazz standard even at this point, and one may scoff a bit at the idea of the band making a cover of this into one of the centerpieces of its repertoire, but the band claims the piece as its own as much as one could reasonably expect. The band simplifies the 9/8 time signature of the original into 4/4, and through this and other arrangement tweaks the band de-emphasizes the tricky intricacy of the original and amplifies its power and majesty, and in the process they basically turn this track into one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Emerson's downward Hammond swishes in the climactic portions are the moments that jump out the most, but there are great noisy guitar passages here and other enjoyable keyboard passages as well, and the powerful steadiness of the rhythm section throughout holds everything together perfectly. Given that I'm somebody who greatly enjoys the extended versions of "Space Truckin'" that Deep Purple would be doing in concert in a few years, it's hard for me to see why I wouldn't adore this track, and I consider it an essential part of my collection.

The second half of the album, then, isn't especially great, but all of the tracks are at least decent. "War and Peace" is another instrumental built around active Hammond organ and guitar work, and while it doesn't live up to "Rondo" in terms of memorable themes or an especially tight rhythm section, it's a rousing blast while on, and I'd definitely take this over a lot of the instrumental passages in some of their later work. "Tantalising Maggie" is an odd take on the style of the rest of the album, with the guitars showing a lot jangly twang amongst the hyperactive keyboards (which suddenly go into a classical piano mode near the end), and with Jackson's vocals confined to one channel in a mildly psychedelic way (until the vocals get all chaotic and weird in the last minute or so, making the psychedelic elements more pronounced). "Dawn" is an odd combination of Hammond noodling (eventually harpsichord noodling), noisy distorted guitar chords and noodling, and lots of whispered vocals that make the track sound very pompous. The track is probably a good example of the bad sides of 1967 in a lot of ways, but I don't especially mind it, and it's yet another interesting change of pace (if there were another track like this on the album then I might view it less favorably). And finally, "The Cry of Eugene" has a muffled vocal part that doesn't allow for the vocal melody to resonate as deeply as it could with better singing, but there's an odd gentleness in the combination of the Hammond and the psychedelic guitars (with a brief frenetic section as the song transitions into a more bombastic conclusion) that I find rather enjoyable (the sudden cutoff at the end is amusing as well). Yes, the album takes a clear step down in the second half, but it's not a crippling one; the first half would be in the range of a D, and the second half would be in the 8 or 9 range, and the combination lets the album settle into a solid B range.

In my edition of the album, there are five bonus tracks, and except for the single version of the title track (it's just as long as and I think it just has a slightly different mix from the original), all of them are worth having. "Azrial (Angel of Death)" combines a solid grumbly guitar riff with bits of atmospheric piano and pompous (but fun) lyrics before briefly turning into a psychedelic freak-out near the end (then returning to the original riff), and it would have been a fine inclusion on the original album. "The Diamond Hard Blue Apples of the Moon" bases itself primarily around a gentle line doubled on Hammond and trumpet (from O'List), and the keyboard passages that grow out of it are rather lovely. The best of the group, though, come in the form of the full-length and single versions of "America," the band's instrumental take on the West Side Story number. The bombastic organ introduction and the closing recitation from a three-year old are a little ridiculous, but the bulk of the song shows The Nice at its very best. The main riff, played by the organ, is used as the launching pad for all sorts of rousing guitar work and inventive keyboard work, and I never find myself getting bored or tired when listening to it. It's too bad the band didn't use this as the album's conclusion, as a sort of balance to closing out the first side with "Rondo" (I get that "War and Peace" is the "Rondo" counter but I'd be fine with swapping that out for "Azrial").

The 19-minute title track, innovative though it might be, is a complete mess. There are interesting individual passages, especially in the jazz-piano section that follows the main vocal section of the piece, but this mix of jazz, classical (featuring a long excerpt from the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto), drum solos and long keyboard passages strikes me as having little, if any, coherence. Yes, "Tarkus" would be longer than this in a couple of years, but "Tarkus" is one of the most cleanly organized large-scale prog pieces ever written, and I enjoy all of the elements within it greatly. Yes, "Karn Evil 9" would be much more sprawling than this, and have some stupid aspects near the end, but that was at least split into three distinct large-scale sections, and each of them had its own clear personality. This one just keeps going and going, dumping in idea after idea with no clear rhyme or reason, and I find it very tedious. Then again, to the band's credit, it's not like they had clear models to base the piece on, so they deserve some credit for the effort.

The first half is more conventional on the whole, and splits between the psychedelic art-pop of the debut and some more excursions into the world of classical-rock synthesis. The latter is represented by the 9-minute interpretation of the Intermezzo from Sibelius' "Karelia Suite," and it's easy to hear the origins of Pictures at an Exhibition in this. The track starts with the trio playing the basic themes of the original more-or-less faithfully, but this turns into a launch pad for some "explorations" that maintain thematic ties to the original piece, eventually culminating in Emerson squeezing all sorts of unhealthy noises from his organ in the end. This is definitely the peak of the band's attempts to fuse classical and rock, though it does sound a little tame compared to Pictures or "The Barbarian."

Ultimately, though, it's the psychedelic art-pop that I like most; at worst, the first three tracks on this album would have been middle-of-the-pack amongst the Emerlist Davjack material. The opening "Daddy Where Did I Come From?" is a great blast of piano-fueled psychedelic rock, with a mid-section consisting of dad making quite the awkward attempt at explaining procreation to his son (among other things he describes how he fornicated a flower). The son's final response to him is hilarious as well. "Little Arabella" is a cheery jazz-pop ditty (with surprisingly decent Jackson vocals) with lots of subtle organ in the beginning and with a brief bit of bombast in the middle. And finally (since I'm not counting the brief 13-second track that precedes the title track) "Happy Freuds" uses all sorts of interesting treatments on the voices of the various band members as they sing about universal love or something over Emerson's organs. This description may make the song seem kinda stupid but the song is quite nice.

This album is difficult to hunt down, and while it's decent enough I'm not sure it's especially worth the effort. As much as a pretty good album can be, this album strikes me as much more interesting than good, but the "interesting" aspects still end up paling to much of what would start happening over the next couple of years in the world of prog rock. Still, it's worth listening to once or twice.

It's a little disconcerting that the best material on the album by a good distance comes from recycling earlier classics. "Azrael Revisited" is indeed a reworking of "Azrial," only without the great guitar playing of the original (the initial riff is played by piano), and the tune is still quite entertaining, and the long piano-centric jam that occupies much of the second half of the song is pretty rousing. The opener of the live half is "Rondo (69)," and it's basically exactly what you'd expect from a live version of "Rondo" with no guitar. It's a blast, of course, and the rhythm section is still awfully tight, but it seems pretty soon to be getting into releasing stuff like this.

The other studio tracks all leave me with the strong nagging wish to hear them redone by ELP (in their prime). "Hang On to a Dream," a cover of a Tim Hardin number, is utterly beautiful when centered around Emerson's majestic piano parts, and is flat-out abysmal when centered on the vocals. Jackson decided to go the route of using a timid whimper, and the attempts to prop him up with angelic female backing vocals are awfully tacky. Lake probably could have made this into something rivaling "Take a Pebble" if he'd sung it in the early 70s, but this doesn't come close. It should be noted that ELP actually did do a version of this eventually, but this was in the early 90s after Lake had largely lost his voice and Emerson had glommed onto digital synths for all they're worth, so it's not really worth hearing. "Diary of an Empty Day" is worth it for all of the playful and energetic organ/piano work, but it would have done better as an instrumental; the sung parts go in one ear and out the other for me. Finally, the nine-minute "For Example" is an interesting horn-laced mix of blues, jazz and classical, with silly quotes of "Norwegian Wood" and "America" stuck near the end, but the sung parts are pretty unbearable. The first portion is mostly hurt by the unintentional comedy of the whispered "pianissimo" backing vocals, but the mid-section is primarily obliterated by Jackson's hoarse voice bellowing out at full force. Emerson is a blast, though.

On the live side, the concluding track, immediately following "Rondo (69)," is a 12-minute cover of Bob Dylan's "She Belongs to Me," and oh this is not good. I'm not offended in principal by the idea of a jammy expansion of a short Dylan song, but this particular jam is all kinds of tedious, and not at all on the level of, say, the extended versions of "Aquatarkus" that ELP would be playing in a few years. Maybe Emerson suddenly made a big leap between this point and when he joined ELP, but it seems more likely to me that the big leap came solely from his collaborators.

I had a harder time acquiring this particular Nice album than any other, and while it's got its good qualities, it has enough bad qualities that I can't especially recommend that anybody else go through the same trouble. This was the final studio recording from the band, and it's just as well; it's just as likely that the band was only going to get less interesting from here on out. If you can get "Azrael Revisited" and "Rondo (69)" without too much difficulty, though, be sure to give them a listen.

The second side is similarly ok, except for the out-of-place closing track "One of Those People," which largely features Jackson singing through a vocoder (it doesn't make him sound any better!) in a way that just makes him sound like a robot in need of a battery change. The live version of the intermezzo from Sibelius' "Karelia Suite" is probably a little better than the original studio version (which was fine itself), partially because of the inclusion of the LSO (which plays the opening portion as normal) but also because it seems like there's a little more energy this time around. Somewhat less successful is the album's interpretation of the scherzo from the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony; the original movement is one of the all-time great scherzi, a complete misdirection before the emotional steamroller of the 4th movement, but hearing it in this context makes it seem cheap and gimmicky. The orchestra plays the opening themes solo (aside from some drum taps from Davison) for a very long time, and while the band does work its way in eventually, the two entities never combine in a way that's very satisfying. And finally, the band finds a way to combine the Nashville Skyline Bob Dylan number "Country Pie" with portions of Bach's 6th Brandenburg Concerto, and while it's actually somewhat slick (and it's way more entertaining than the "She Belongs to Me" bore on Nice) it never really leaves me wanting to listen to it again. I really wish Jackson sang better.

This album is ok, but while it was probably intended to appeal to both rock fans and classical fans, I'd have a hard time recommending it to either. There's a such a long distance in quality between the classical music the band (well, Emerson) was writing and the classical music the band was covering that it should have left everybody involved feeling a little embarrassed, and while the band's efforts are noble in spicing up the pieces with organ solos and a rhythm section, they just don't work that well. Still, it's worth hearing a couple of times, and it's actually one of the easier Nice albums to get ahold of, so that's a plus.

The studio tracks are awful at worst and pointless at best. Once again the band decides to take on a Dylan cover, this time choosing my beloved "My Back Pages," and while I appreciate the band's efforts to embellish it during the instrumental breaks, I find that I just can't get beyond the singing. Dylan's vocals in the original might irritate some, but he conveyed a perfect balance of humility and majestic power in them. Jumping forward a few years, the version that The Byrds did on Younger Than Yesterday preserved the emotional heft of the original vocal part while adding some nice harmonies and making it a bit more tuneful. This version, though, is a vocal massacre, and whether the tendency to fall out of key repeatedly was intentional doesn't really matter to me. Among the list of artists whose work I generally respect, this is one of the worst Dylan covers I can think of (oddly, another contender for this title is a "My Back Pages" that The Ramones did on Acid Eaters).

The other studio track is the band's interpretation of the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony, done in live form on Five Bridges, and it's as dull and pointless as before. As I've said before, the movement is amazing and majestic and rousing and everything a scherzo should be, but it doesn't seem like the band (read: Emerson) really knew what to do with it. There's a distressing sense of auto-pilot here that wasn't really present on the band's "Karelia Suite" interpretation, certainly wouldn't be present on Pictures at an Exhibition.

The live tracks are a little better on the whole, but not enough so to save the album. In "Hang on to a Dream," the vocal parts improve from "awful" to "anonymous," thanks to the elimination of the generic female chorus and Jackson's very quiet and timid delivery, so that helps some, though not a lot. Emerson leads the band through a lot of different styles over the course of 12 minutes, and it's fun to hear Emerson fully turned loose, but the mid-section could have just as easily been transplanted into any other song. Personally, for this sort of Emerson playing, I'd much rather listen to his piano improvisations in the Welcome Back live album a few years later. And finally, there's a 10-minute rendition of "America," which is a lot of fun for about 6 minutes, then gets a little too organ-stabby-feedback-y for a while, but ultimately is still a blast on the whole. If there's a reason to buy this album, it's definitely "America." That's not really a great endorsement for the album, though; the original studio version is ultimately superior.

PS: I should note that the version I acquired, the 1990 CD release, has a bunch of bonus tracks, which are just alternate mixes of a bunch of stuff from the first couple of albums. "Dawn," "Diamond-Hard Blue Apples of the Moon," "Daddy Where Did I Come From?" and the like.