Welcome to 2015, and Happy New Year. We've lots of great things planned for this year, some of which will take place in this very journal, though admittedly a lot of them outside it. I hope to prevent these new journals and other developments from taking away from my work here, but it may get just a little less busy around here, due to the volume of work I have set myself. Be that as it may, welcome back and as I mentioned at the end of last year, as well as some new series starting up I will be reviving and even expanding some old ones, one of which I intend to start off with here.
I've always been a big fan of The Alan Parsons Project, ever since I heard “Eye in the sky” and “Old and wise”, and in general their albums have never disappointed. However, Eric Woolfson was a big part of the APP and with his split with Parsons in 1990, “Gaudi” proved to be the final album from the Project as Alan went it alone. Eric's passing in 2005 meant there would never be a reconciliation or any more albums featuring the co-founder of the band, and though Alan's first and second albums were what I would call triumphs, this, his third, leaves much to be desired.
The time machine --- Alan Parsons --- 1999 (Miramar)
Perhaps significant that this album marked the coming to an end of a decade and a millennium, and taken as a body of work, the thirteenth Parsons album, this for me heralds his lowest point. Up to then, the only album I could point to and say I really didn't like was 1977's “I robot”, and even that has more decent tracks than bad. This, however, has maybe two. It's a total departure in direction musically, with a lot more electronic/trancey elements in the overall progressive rock we have been used to down the years --- and which continued through his first two solo albums, “Try anything once” and “On air” --- and though it maintains the by-now signature instrumentals and the various vocalists, there's something ... not quite right about it. It's almost like Parsons is not really listening to what's being played, not really that bothered, distracted. If I didn't know it wasn't the case, I would have said it was a “contractual obligations” album, one that he didn't really want to make, but the roots of this concept apparently go back to 1977, when he and Woolfson considered the theme of time travel for “I robot”, discarding it in the end.
So it's twenty-two years later, and with Woolfson (at the time) out of the way and doing his own solo thing, you would have thought this was Parsons's chance to really go for it, and create the album he had wanted to, back then at the tail-end of the seventies when they were just getting up a head of steam and getting noticed, and perhaps could not afford to take such risks. But what do we get? A triumphant vindication of the original idea? Some superb songs, some okay ones, a suite or concerto as Parsons gleefully validates his vision?
Um, no. We get a very weak album with almost half of it instrumentals, some guest singers like Beverley Craven, Maire Brennan and Tony Hadley of all people, and nothing of the flair and panache of the last two albums, or indeed any of the previous ones under the name of the Project. I can pick out one favourite, which almost saves the album for me, as the ever-reliable Colin Blunstone lulls us in “Ignorance is bliss”
and then Maire Brennan does a lovely turn on “Call of the wild”, which oddly enough sounds like Mike Oldfield interpreting “She moves through the fair”
and really, the other ballad is the only other decent track, featuring Beverley Craven on “The very last time”, but the problem is it sounds so much more like one of her own songs than one of Alan's.
Even the usually dependable instrumentals are not up to much, like “Rubber universe”
“Far ago and long away”
or the title track, which opens the album
and the less said about “Call up”
and “Press rewind”
the better.
Tony Hadley tries to restore some class to the album with “Out of the blue”
but it just isn't happening. This is dead in the water, and I was hugely disappointed with it when I first heard it. That was the first time I could ever, or had ever to say that about an Alan Parsons album. I had worried, when he went solo, if he would be up to it, but basically all he did was drop the name and keep the band, minus of course Eric Woolfson, and I loved both his first two albums. After this, he has only released one other, 2004's “A valid path”, but this has scarred me so with his music that I'm not sure I'm ready to be hurt again, to trust again and take the chance that this was just a temporary blip.
I'm not coming out of the shelter just yet. Not till I know it's safe...