“Love Beach” by Emerson, Lake & Palmer: considered as serious release?

Question

The album Love Beach by Emerson, Lake & Palmer was made with the intention of fulfilling a contract obligation. So, they could have released an experimental or an absolutely demotivated album, but they instead created this rather bizarre LP. From the cliché cover photo to the lyrics (check out these sexist lyrics for example – written by Sinfield!), everything seems so excessively wrong if you take their previous work as a progressive act into account.

Is there any article or review (possibly even written at the same time) where somebody interprets this release as satire?

Answer 1

The album was not satire. It was a contractual obligation to manufacture a radio-friendly collection of songs. The band individually have said as much. Here is a pretty good "Reader's Digest" review of what went down, which was written as a 35th Anniversary review a few years back. To condense:

Looking back on the album during a 2011 interview, Keith Emerson argued that if the band had only managed to stand behind ‘Love Beach,’ it might have been a success. “I think all of us got cold feet,” he admitted, imagining that “If we’d gone out on the road and said ‘Forget what you’ve been listening to, this is the new direction,’” fans would have been more willing to follow along. He still had to concede, however, that their “new direction” had been motivated by commercial concerns.