Even the piano middle section in Lake's beautiful ballad "Take A Pebble" (among the best songs he did with the band) has a driven quality. This is not Rick Wakeman's tastefully-elegant baroque piano but keyboard-as-machine-gun. It still retains it's beauty and the opening and closing passages are almost gentle and fragile, compared to the rest of the album. "Take A Pebble" is a song that sounds almost like a bridge between classic ELP and early King Crimson---it has that meandering Lake acoustic guitar solo in the middle that reminds me of Crimso's jazzy, meandering side (no surprise, as Lake had just come from that group). The last song, the classic hit "Lucky Man", sounds out of place on this album, a folk song among classical organ and piano work-outs, but it is possessed of a magnificent opulence, as Lake adds on multi-tracked choir vocals on the choruses, guitar solos, and that classic Keith-playing-with-the-Moog-glide-control synthesizer solo on the outro, a howl that fades into a low frequency whistle that fades into an electronic hiss. Palmer's echo-ing drums ride out the end to a masterful FM radio hit that announced to the world that there was this strange-sounding new band, ELP!

Their debut album was truly the work of a prog rock super-group...there hadn't been a union of a top-notch keyboardist, very good bass player with a soaring, majestic voice, and top-notch drummer like this in a power trio format like this before. Groundbreaking work!!