THE ALAN PARSONS PROJECT

This is the band's most popular album, with, I think, I Robot and The Turn Of The Friendly Card being close behind. Unlike those albums, Eye In The Sky is more or less a standardized artsy?poppy soft rock album for the 80s. Now admittedly, I am actually fine with this direction Alan Parsons Project takes here, they definitely already had a knack for pop music so this isn't bad to me, but you can definitely tell these songs were kinda made for the radios and single sales.

The best way to describe this album in my opinion is that it is a good pop album, but not really the best Alan Parsons Project album. I think the best aspect of the album is obviously Alan Parsons production, as expected with anything he has a hand in, and also the first side of the album. I think Sirius through Silence And I are some of the best music the band has created, with the more fun pop comings of Eye In The Sky and Gemini, to the more overtly art rock Children Of The Moon and Silence and I. Silence and I is especially my favorite track off this album, due to its power and emotion that builds throughout its 7 minute run.

However, the album definitely showcases its potholes with the second side. Unlike the moody, and more artistic first side, side B is a lot more basic (for lack of a better term) in terms of music, having a lot of songs that are kinda your usual soft rock flair from the 80s. I am not that offended by the second side, mostly since I grew up in a more pop loving household so the sound is a bit more well known for my tastes, but some of these songs I feel just aren't really that good, especially You're Gonna Get Your Fingers Burned and Step by Step. I also feel like compared to the first side it just doesn't stack as well. I mean how are you gonna compare the slightly lackluster instrumental Mammagamma with the pretty and somber Gemini?

I would be a lot more forgiving if this wasn't an Alan Parsons Project album, but since it is, and since this band has made some really great music especially on their second sides (IE The Fall Of The House Of Usher suite and The Turn Of The Friendly Card suite) I feel like I can give this album it's dues and critiques, especially since after this album the band kinda starts to sound like they are constantly trying to do what this album does, instead of trying new and fresh ideas like they did before. Well, the second side isn't all that bad, Old and Wise is on it and that song is a fantastic closer in my humble opinion.

Again, this is not a bad album, but for Alan Parsons Project standards it is kinda lukewarm. There are definitely a lot of good moments on here, but the very top heavy song structure, plus the very middle of the road songs on the second side just doesn't get me wanting to return to it all that much. If you like the more pop stylings of Yes or Genesis in the 80s then this isn't a bad record to put on your shelf, but if you want something more proggy like what this band did before, you'd best be looking somewhere else.

In particular, La Sagrada Familia works in elements of traditional Spanish music and bombastic opera, offering a richer range of sounds than the band had offered since at least as far back as Turn of a Friendly Card. Paseo De Gracia, likewise, incorporates Spanish guitar to add an air of drama to proceedings.

It's the pop numbers in the middle which are shakier. Too Late has a bit of bite to it, Closer To Heaven is fine, but Standing on Higher Ground, Money Talks, and Inside Looking Out are lacklustre and overlong.

As such, I'm inclined to say that whilst Gaudi is an improvement over Stereotomy - in my view their weakest album of the 1980s - it's not a radical one. It may be that, starting and finishing strong as it does, it leaves the listener with a better impression than it perhaps deserves, since thinking back on it you'll remember the good moments and overlook the weaker patches. Call it three and a half stars, rather than a return to the four star standards of their better works.

It's a compact, affordable way to get the complete run of releases from the band, all sounding delightful. Why only four stars, then? Well, it's largely because the Project was very much a four-star band at best. They produced some good albums, they produced some which were only lukewarm, but to my ears at least they never produced an album which was truly great; four stars was very much their ceiling.

At the same time, because of the modest pricing of this CD set it's prompted me to finally sit down and listen to some Project albums I never previously got around to - all of which have their finer moments here and there - which I might not otherwise have done. So if you want a one-purchase-and-done APP collection, this is what you want.

It's the sort of thing which wouldn't sound amiss on the same playlist as mid-1980s era Genesis, and if you like that, you'll probably like this album, though as with its two predecessors you'll only like it; you won't love it, you won't rave about it, and whilst this incarnation of the Project might share the same bill as the contemporary version of Genesis, that's the big difference.

Sure, if you specifically want prog then neither act is going to offer you much - but if you come to this from a pop perspective, Genesis at the height of their pop period were simply more exciting and refreshing than the Alan Parsons Project were. For that matter, they did at least have little departures to offer like Home By the Sea/Second Home By the Sea; that's not the case here. Even if you personally don't like mid-1980s Genesis, you can imagine how someone might be very enthusiastic about them.

I can't think very many people at all are enthused by the Alan Parsons Project's mid-1980s pop albums, by comparison, and this might be my least favourite of the Ammonia Avenue/Vulture Culture/Stereotomy triptych, with Limelight in particular being a big cheesy torch song which does nothing for me. The long instrumental Where's the Walrus is the closest thing we get here to any sort of progressive flourish, and perhaps saves the album from being a write-off in my eyes, but it's barely clinging to a three-star rating whereas I'd put both of its predecessors at the low end of three and a half stars. It may well be the group's weakest effort, though Eve gives it a run for its money in that race.

If you liked the art pop stylings of Ammonia Avenue, that's not necessarily such a bad thing - you'll probably like this one. (I particularly enjoyed Let's Talk About Me, which has a bit more bite than any other song on this album or the previous one.) On the other hand, you probably won't do much more than like it. There's something to be said for making a choice between being loved by a few or liked by many - but it feels like in the mid-1980s the Alan Parsons Projects were choosing between being loved by a few or liked by a few, and chose the latter.

Whether this is a disaster or merely a further musical evolution is a matter of perspective. If you slide Ammonia Avenue in alongside the art pop produced by prog veterans in the 1980s, like post-Abacab Genesis or 90125-era Yes, it's a more than acceptable album in that style. But if you're only interested in the prog side of the Project, and wish their musical evolution had gone in exactly the opposite direction, you're not going to keen on this.

For my part, I fall into the former camp, but I would say that the album is pleasant, enjoyable, nice, entertaining... all those lukewarm second-tier praise words. It's not gripping in the way a really excellent album, whether prog or pop, can be.

In the long run, this led to a new deal, and a happier Parsons and Woolfson going away to put out The Turn of a Friendly Card, which would be something of a return to form after the patchy Eve. As for The Sicilian Defence, it was stuck in the vault, eventually getting an official release as part of the Complete Albums Collection boxed set. Previously, Alan Parsons had been very against it getting a release, though Woolfson had put out one of its tracks as a bonus track on something, and Parsons eventually relented for the sake of making sure that box was as complete as the name implied.

So, what do you get on here? There's an extent to which this is "APP Goes Tangerine Dream", with synth-based tracks sounding much like the output of Edgar Froese's merry band (or, for that matter, Jean-Michel Jarre) as of the close of the 1970s. Other tracks resort to acoustic piano instrumentals, played in a charming and graceful fashion. Indeed, initially the tracks seem to alternate synthesiser/acoustic/synthesiser/acoustic - in keeping with the concept of a chess game with alternating sides taking their turns - though the pattern ends up breaking by the fifth track. (The chess moves in the title tracks are legitimate, and to my eyes set up a situation where black ends up in quite a strong position - it's the "Classical Variation" on the Sicilian Defence, hence perhaps the classical music influences on the instrumentals which get teased out as the album progresses.)

Certainly, though it was blitzed through in three days as a contractual obligation piece, there was at least some effort put into this: if you just want to fill 40 minutes of tape there's faster and easier ways of doing it, after all, but I guess professional pride (and the risk that the record company might actually call their bluff and release the thing) forced Parsons and Woolfson to produce something which had just a little polish to it. That said, there's a certain repetitiveness to the whole thing - each track is fairly clearly based on a fairly limited set of musical ideas which the duo vamp on until they've hit enough time.

If you are hoping for something like the Project's other albums, you can more or less rule it out - at most this is a collection of sketches of tunes which might have become Alan Parsons Project albums given a little more time to percolate and develop. On the other hand, if the idea of a more raw, stripped-back approach of just Parson and Woolfson noodling through some musical ideas appeals, then there's something to enjoy here.

The participants have insisted that the idea was about the challenges women face, though frankly it comes across more like a bunch of men demonising women - indeed, no women are heard at all on 7 of the 9 tunes here, with only Clare Torry and Lesley Duncan getting a chance to be heard, and it's hard not to see the album as being more about mens' views of women than it is about women themselves.

This might be a clever and insightful theme for a concept album if more of an attempt were made to challenge and self-criticise those views, rather than simply taking them as read - but as it stands, it just feels faintly embarrassing, with points which sound like the audio equivalent of an incel message board.

This is exacerbated by the structure of the album; the idea seems to have been to present the negative side of women on side one, and the positive side on side two (which includes the two tracks which have women on lead vocals). There's two issues that mean it doesn't quite work; the first is that it's a concept which inherently is based around grand, sweeping generalisations, and the second is that the condemnation on side 1 seems to vastly outweigh the praise in side two, leaving the whole thing seeming imbalanced.

To be fair, only I'd Rather Be A Man would stand out as being especially misogynistic if you took it on its own - the rest of the compositions here would be inoffensive if heard in isolation. It's when you put them all together in one package that side 1 ends up seeming so ugly and bitter, and overshadows side 2's more conciliatory tone so much.

The bitterness may have been exacerbated by the fact that Parson and Woolfson were at odds with Arista at this time, and were grumpy about their contract. Indeed, this would be around the time that they knocked off The Sicilian Defence in three days, delivering it to the record company simultaneously with Eve, in order to burn through their contractual obligations and leverage Arista back to the barganining table. The end result was a renewed contract and something of a return to form on The Turn of a Friendly Card.

The Sicilian Defence was an infamous goof-off - a deliberately lazy effort that Parsons and Woolfson didn't seriously expect to see the light of day - but it's hard not to feel like they may have been holding back a little here, keeping back their most choice ideas just in case that contract negotiation fell through and they needed to offer something tasty and tempting to some other record company.

The end result is that Eve barely scrapes to three star status off the back of the pristine production and lush instrumental backing to its compositions, but the combination of Parsons and Woolfson semi-phoning it in and the bitter tone of the whole thing means it's hard to give it more credit than that.

I Robot is one of APP's most acclaimed albums in the 70s, and for really good reasons. I think the main appeal here is the fact that this came out during the time when Prog rock was starting to fade from public consciousness, and with this album's more pop-like approach, they managed to create an album that both popheads and progheads could enjoy. I find the main appeal for this album, for me at least, is the strong musical architecture this duo creates. You get flavors of your usual, classic Prog rock affair, but mixed with funk, ambient, soft rock, and even a bit of Pink Floydian sounding space rock with Day After Day (The Show Must Go On). It really allows this record to feel like an actual project the two members worked on. Something to test their own sounds and stylizations, and I am all for it. Not only do they harness that fun and lively 70s pop into their progressive sound, but they also bend their own flutes and try to make something that is quite varied in their approach.

This record is a concept album, and one that, at the surface, might not seem so apparent. Basically, it draws slight concepts from Isaac Asimov's Robot Stories, which delves in philosophies and themes from AI, and humanity. I find it cool that Asimov was around to happily approve and listen to this final conceptual work. In fact, many of the album's themes draw from these books, especially on the last track of Genesis Ch. 1 V.32, which is an implication piece, drawing parallels to the Bible's Genesis story, having a first chapter that has 31 verses, and so this song being a 32nd verse showcases a new age of life, being a lot more robotic yet still alive. While the concept is considerably loose, I find it really cool how the story of these books draws their seams into the album's workings, kinda like how The Flaming Lips would do 24 years later with Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. This album has a lot more of a mechanical and cold feel, but still resonates that fun, carefree pop tone APP is quite known for, which I think is quite appealing.

I do have some problems with this record, and it's that I feel as though they really gave out some missed opportunities for something greater. I wasn't looking for any epics since I can find them in their first and fifth record, but I won't deny that tracks like Some Other Time, Nucleus, and especially Total Eclipse left me in the cold. They weren't as big or as excellent sounding as Breakdown or The Voice, which is quite disappointing. Also I felt the length of the record was quite underwhelming. I kinda, no, really wanted there to be some sort of grander ending, possibly with Genesis Ch. 1 V.32 being a lot longer than 3 minutes (possibly 7 or 8 minutes) as it develops more and more upon itself, giving this album a great closure. Either way, even if this album has a few missed potentials and a few chilled feet, I think this is quite a charming little album.

I decided to listen to another APP album because of this record, and so it made me a fan of this duo's unique blending of pop rock, Prog rock, and many other genres. I won't say it is an essential listening experience, especially in regards to 1977 albums, but this is not a bad record, and in fact one that is worth looking into for anyone curious to get in APP like I did. A cold, metallic album that despite its breezes can still warm up a groove in my feet.