Vulture Culture (1984)
You know, scanning down through the track listing here, I've rethought my attitude towards this album. I used to consider it one of the weaker ones, but I think my attention was focused on the title track and the only instrumental on it, neither of which I liked. Now, when I consider all the excellent tracks on it, I think I was being unduly unfair to it, and I definitely have to re-evaulate it on that basis, so this review will be much more positive than I had originally intended. The idea on the album cover is interesting: while the title features a bird it's a reptile that gets on the cover, a depiction of the Ouroboros, the symbol for eternity and repetition, the snake swallowing its own tail and making an endless circle which is never broken. To some, that could I guess be taken as an admission that this music is merely recycled from previous albums, that the APP had run out of ideas, but that's not really true. There are some very interesting concepts explored on this album, and as I say, up to now I really haven't given it the credit it deserves.
So let's do that now.
It opens on what would be another minor hit for the guys, but their last ever, as “Let's Talk About Me” comes in very very softly, with taped conversation and humming synth before percussion and guitar snap in and the petulant voice of David Paton shouts “Let's talk about me for a minute”, in the persona of a man who never has a say in his relationship. The song rocks along nicely, a real bopper, and it's easy to see how this was chosen as a single, and why it was successful as such. Good backing vocals and sort of choir too; in the middle it drops down for a moment then picks right back up and Bairnson fires off a really angry solo following more speech, apparently supplied by media mogul Lee Abrams, a man almost single-handedly responsible for creating the AOR style of radio, so it says here.
Thick, almost electronica synth pulls in “Separate Lives” as Eric Woolfson laments on the breakup of a relationship, and though it's a semi-ballad it really isn't played like one, and has a great hook in the verse. There are some elements of “Sirius”, but I think in ways this kind of harks back to the debut, though with a very modern sound. The real ballad, the first of two, is “Days are Numbers (The Traveller”), but let's just pause here for a moment. I find it interesting, perhaps foolish, perhaps brave, that three of the tracks here all have titles possessed by other songs released around the same time. There's this one, a track on Chris de Burgh's
Eastern Wind, the previous, which was a major hit for Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin, and while the penultimate one is called “Somebody Out There”, it's close enough to the huge hit by James Ingram and Linda Ronstadt not to... oh hold on. Both those last two have yet to be released when this album hits, so the only one of any consequence is the Chris de Burgh one, and who the hell gives a **** about Chris de Burgh? Carry on.
So “Days Are Numbers” comes in on a rippling guitar line, kind of strummed maybe, after some kind of announcement like maybe at a train station (the Traveller, geddit?) and lets us hear the voice of Eric Woolfson for the first time on the album. It's a sweet, bitter song of moving on, never finding a home, a man driven by desperate urges to keep travelling and never able to settle anywhere. In some ways it mimicks the themes of Bread's classic “Guitar Man”, though for vastly different reasons, and in others it's reminiscent -in lyrical content only - of Simon and Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound", but it's a lovely song, with a real aching vocal from Woolfson. There's a philosophical message in it when he sings
”Days are numbers, watch the stars/ We can only see so far/ Someday you'll know where you are.” and the sense of a man being driven on by forces he can't understand. There's a new addition to the project here, and David Cottle this time take sax duties as he belts out a fine solo near the end.
Woolfson is back then for “Sooner or Later”, in Parsons' own admission an attempt to replicate the success of “Eye in the Sky”, and yes, you can hear it, the rhythm and melody quite similar, but it's a great little song, again referencing a relationship, with a really nice guitar line from Bairnson as Woolfson cries
”What a price we pay for the things we say/ And the closer I get to you the further you move away.” Well, so much for my contention that the APP weren't specifically trying to write hits! A smooth, lyrical guitar solo from Bairnson backed up by some choral vocals and we're into the track that was skewing my judgement of this album, the title one, and guess who's behind the mike?
I think it's possible that this is the performance of his that annoys me the most about Lenny Zakatek. It certainly produced a lasting impression, since it seemed like the entire album was poor with my recollection of this, and that just isn't so. Reminds me of the opening of “Psychobabble” from
Eye in the Sky, very much so really, with horn work from Cottle around the edges, but apart from his voice grating on me, there's something, I don't know – hollow? - about his delivery here on the verses at least. Maybe the production is off, though with Alan Parsons that's not really something you expect so maybe it's just him. The horns now give it a kind of jazzy, Mariachi feel, and while Paton's bass does its best to give the song heart, I just really don't like it. It seems to reference – along with the album title and cover I guess – the idea of “no friends in business” when Zakatek sings
”Vulture culture, never lend a loser a hand.” The funky little bass line at the end helps, but nah.
I'm not a fan of the sole instrumental either, which continues very much the Mexican style, with one spoken line in among the music, lots of handclaps, whistles, brass... yeah it's uptempo and breezy but it just isn't for me. But luckily those two tracks, the weakest of the whole album, are the only two weak ones, and it finishes strongly as “Somebody Out There” seems (to me at least) to tackle the idea of a
doppelganger, an evil double who in mythology would go around doing things in your name and getting you into trouble.
Stephen King used this as the central theme for his novel
The Outsider, but there it involved ritualistic murder (who woulda thunk it, huh?) whereas here it's more a sense of mischief as Colin Blunstone, of all people, takes the song – very definitely NOT a ballad – and puts a lot of anxiety and panic into it. It does however fool you into thinking that it is a ballad, as it starts on a rolling piano and a soft vocal from Colin, as he wonders if he's going crazy?
”Maybe I'm imagining the things they say about me/ Maybe there is really nothing there at all” but quickly comes to realise he has a double, and he's out to get him as the song speeds up –
”Somebody out there/Stolen your face/Somebody out there/Parked in your space/No reservation, he's taken your place!” There's an odd kind of mechanised bridge in the song, which works well into creating the whole sense of paranoia it spreads, and the hurried, almost rushed tempo adds to this. There is respite when Bairnson comes in with a soothing guitar solo, but quickly we're off again as Blunstone chases his double, trying to make people see he's not mad after all.
We end then on the second ballad, the wonderful “The Same Old Sun”, where we welcome Woolfson back for his final performance on this album. It's just beautiful, and I haven't heard one as nice since, except maybe Alan's solo effort “Oh Life! (There Must Be More)”. With its ringing piano opening and its lush orchestration it builds to a superb climax as Woolfson faces another crisis in a broken relationship –
”There's a smile on my face but I'm only pretending”, I personally believe this is not just a lover left, but having left this mortal coil, and maybe he's sitting at her grave asking her
”Tell me what to do/Now there's nobody watching over me”. Sad, moving and a great closer to an album that deserves more respect than I had given it up to now.
TRACK LISTING
Let's Talk About Me
Separate Lives
Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)
Sooner or Later
Vulture Culture
Hawkeye
Somebody Out There
The Same Old Sun
Though this album was the last to chart for the Alan Parsons Project, and the last to give them any sort of hit singles, they continued to turn out consistently excellent albums until their final disbanding in 1987 as Woolfson and Parsons went their separate ways, the former to a solo career that has so far spanned four albums, the latter to produce what would have been the band's last album,
Freudiana, released in 1990 and then a series of musicals culminating in the final collection of Parsons tunes that never made it onto any album,
Alan Parsons That Never Was, mere months before his untimely death from cancer in 2009.
In terms of poor albums, then, I can confidently say that the APP really never quite had one. The debut was a little shaky, I felt, but after that – and with the benefit of hindsight and listening to and reviewing them again – there isn't one I wouldn't be happy to play, though a few tracks might be skipped on
Eye in the Sky, making it, paradoxically perhaps, their most famous and successful and at the same time their weakest album, in my opinion.
But this one has, after thirty years and more, finally regained its place among my favourite APP albums, and I'm happy to welcome it back again.
Rating: 9.2/10