EVE

The fourth Alan Parsons Project album is yet another crisply produced collection of tunes. Sonically speaking, things lean a little more towards a prog-pop direction than the first three albums (though not enormously so, since there'd always been a dose of that in the mix), though perhaps a little less inspired and catchy than preceding releases from the group, and lyrically speaking the album is a mess.

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.