Back in 1988 3 released their sole album To The Power of Three and it didn’t really set the world on fire.  Perhaps if the band was named Emerson, Berry & Palmer it would have done better. Formed by Brits Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer, along with Californian Robert Berry, 3 existed for two years, enough time for an album and a tour.  Once the tour was over, Emerson ended the band. Prog fans said the band wasn’t proggy enough and they were just trying to follow the likes of Asia and 80s Yes.  The album did have one song chart on the Billboard Rock Charts, the only single “Talkin’ About”.

Emerson and Palmer went back to Emerson, Lake and Palmer.  Berry fell into a “so close” career as he came close to replacing Steve Hackett in GTR only to see the band break up. The ensuing years saw him in the band Alliance releasing four albums, mostly in Europe and Japan, as well as overseeing several tribute albums for prog label Magna Carta in the 90s.  His solo album from 1992, Pilgrimage To a Point included songs earmarked for a second 3 album as well as songs written for GTR.

Decades after the 3 album, keyboardist Emerson and vocalist, guitarist Berry began talking about revisiting the band. Berry and Emerson started throwing ideas at each other, going so far as signing a deal with Frontiers Records and recording demos of keyboard ideas and writing lyrics.  Then in March 2016 Emerson killed himself.

Berry was left with 3 options:  walk away from the project, use the demos that he had of Emerson playing (around 20% of the album in his estimate) and finish the rest, or completely record everything new.  Unfortunately the estate of Keith Emerson lowered the options to two as they would not give him permission to use any of Emerson’s demos.  With the blessing of Frontier Record’s CEO, Berry went about recording everything fresh, including trying to replicate Emerson’s parts. Everything heard on the album is played by Berry, it was obviously a work of love and therapy for him.

The Rules Have Changed comes across as a perfect tribute to Emerson.  As expected, this is a keyboards first album, each song has an obligatory Emersonish solo, with bass and guitar acting as accompaniment. What is amazing though is how well Berry does to capture the essence of Emerson’s playing.  There’s a style that he had, very different from his contemporaries such as Rick Wakeman, and Berry nails it to a T.  He has said that eight years of classical piano training helped him, even so, the results are astonishing.

The songs are not as commercial as the first album, in fact this album should be embraced more by the prog community as it’s more of what they were looking for back in 1988.  The song closest to the original album’s feel is track 2 , “Powerful Man”.  The other songs are much less commercial and of course this may be contributed to the fact that no radio will play new music from a classic rock band.  Several of the tracks tackle the issue of Emerson’s death but none more so than “Our Bond”.  Beautifully played on piano with more orchestration as the song grows , until it goes into a Copeland inspired Emerson tirade at the end.

A highlight of the album is “The Letter”, it starts off in a singer songwriter acoustic guitar style in the vein of Michael McDermott, until again it builds and builds to a crescendo and baroque combination of keyboards, piano and strings.

One final note.  It’s thirty years since the first 3 album and Robert Berry’s voice has not changed at all.  His powerful voice was one of the things that drew me to the original album, and what also has perplexed me as to why he never made it big. The fact that this album exists at all is nothing short of a triumph and miracle for him.

website: http://www.robertberry.com

NOTE: I had to give the album a 3…..rating what else would suffice??