Trollheart

Interesting fact: 0.000001% of Irish people give a **** about American Football.

Source: The Book of Trollheart, Volume XVII (Third edition).

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bob_32_116

I'm not disputing your factoid, but why Ireland in particular?

Trollheart

Cuz I'm Irish, and I'm the one who wrote it.

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bob_32_116

Ah, I see.

Why don't you put your location in your profile location field? Sometimes the geographical context of a post is useful to know.

Trollheart

Cos it's funnier and most people here know I'm a Paddy anyway.

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Trollheart

Eve (1979)

One thing the Alan Parsons Project have always done well is concepts, and differently to other bands, especially prog ones. Rather than, as is usual, write a story and then music to link the various parts of it (think anything from The Wall to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or Rush's seminal first side of 2112) they tended to develop a concept and then write songs which were loosely tied in to that theme, but didn't necessarily follow it as a story line. Check for instance the last-but-one album, I Robot, which touches on the inherent danger in giving too much power to machines, or their final album as a band, Gaudi, based around the life of the Spanish architect. There are always songs that refer to the theme, but then there are others that seem to bear no real resemblance to it, more I guess Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (Iron Maiden) than Misplaced Childhood (Marillion).

Here though, the concept seems to follow through pretty much all of the tracks, which isn't that terribly hard, as Eve is based around the theme, once espoused by Tammy Wynette, that sometimes it's hard to be a woman. It looks at the different challenges women face, from men, from other women and from the world at large, and in ways it can be seen almost as a link to the previous album, with its references to the Bible, Genesis and the creation of beings.

Like that album, this one begins with an instrumental, and you're in no doubt what the theme is when an album called Eve opens with a track called “Lucifer”. It comes in slowly, fading in with ambient sounds, Morse code which apparently taps out two letters, E and V (with another E on the end – EVE, geddit?) then the rhythm slowly comes up, bopping along in a typical APP melody, holow, boucning, rumbling drumbeats and jangly guitar joined by high-pitched keyboard, almost tubular bells in one way. It says this was a big hit on the dance floors of Europe, and I can see why, though I doubt anyone dancing to it had the faintest clue what band it was. Almost, but not quite, trance before trance was a thing. It's a long instrumental, just over five minutes, and it leads into “You Lie Down With Dogs”, which is the kind of song that could only be sung really by Lenny Zakatek, and so it is he who takes vocal duties.

It's a bitter, harsh little song, quite misogynistic in tone, meant, I assume, to demonstrate how some men treat women as little more than their property, and how some women have to go to extremes to survive. Laconic guitar from Ian Bairnson gets it going before the song takes a sort of funky left turn, with a humming bass line from David Paton. I'm going to stick my neck out and imagine the woman in this song is a prostitute, and given that the singer is then one of her clients it's a little rich that he tells her ”You lie down with dogs/ You get up with thieves.” Intentionally, of course, the man comes off as the worse of the two parties in this exchange, as he berates the woman he's paying for sex for having chosen, or been pushed into this lifestyle. I like the guitar solo and the slightly processed backing vocal is very effective too.

There's no let up for the poor woman in “I'd Rather Be a Man”, as she continues to get harassed about her gender. Hypnotic little bass line here and a galloping guitar riff which again showcases the kind of sound we would hear from the Alan Parsons Project over the years. It's in fact Paton who takes the vocal on this one, as he will from time to time, and he delivers a fine performance. More references to the Bible when he sings ”Blame it on the apple tree/ But you don't fool me.” The climbing keyboard arpeggios are great here and build to a real crescendo as the song hurtles along, with another abrupt ending into the first of two ballads, Dave Townsend this time behind the mike. Much softer and gentle, and in essence a love song, “You Won't Be There” nevertheless has a sting in its tale, as the singer accuses his lover ”Just when I need you/ You won't be there.”. Driven very much on piano with Andrew Powell's orchestral arrangement really coming into its own here.

Bairnson's guitar is quite restrained, even when he slips into an expressive solo, and the bridge at the end is really excellent, and it's the third consecutive track on the album to end abruptly, though it does segue almost directly from an orchestral ending into a winding clock sound and sort of musical box effect which opens the faster “Winding Me Up”, giving me a sense of Chris De Burgh circa Eastern Wind. Quite AOR and you could imagine it being a single. Vocals this time are taken by Chris Rainbow with some good backing vocals too, and almost a flute solo, though presumably synthesised (maybe not; there is an orchestra involved, after all) joined by Bairnson's guitar and then what sounds like violin and flute accompanying rippling piano. And yet again it's a short, sharp ending.

A kind of almost video-game synthy introduction to “Damned if I Do” before the familiar “Parsons March”, as I call it, pounds in and we have again Lenny Zakatek on the vocals, another uptempo song with a great hook in it and a sort of parping bass line running through the melody. A beautiful, sumptuous orchestral piece in the midsection which gives way to a sharp guitar solo from Bairnson, this the first track on the album – bar the opening instrumental – which actually fades. We then get the first ever female vocal on an Alan Parsons Project album, as Clare Torry (yes, that one – you remember “The Great Gig in the Sky” don't you?) takes command for “Don't Hold Back”, which

I must admit is one of my least favourites on this album – and I don't have many of those. But this to me comes across as too straight-forward rock and roll, just a bit too ordinary. It is nice to hear a woman singing for once, it's just a pity that it's on such a, well, ordinary song. I can't really think of much to say about it and I always forget what it goes like when I scan the track listing for this album. Its only saving grace is that it's almost the shortest track, at just over three and a half minutes, and it returns to the trend of ending suddenly. Even Bairnson's guitar solo sounds bored and pedestrian, as if he really can't be bothered. Much better is “Secret Garden”, basically an instrumental, with Chris Rainbow on his second visit to the mike on this album just performing some sort of scat singing and Beach Boys-style vocal harmonies, The main melody kind of parallels, more slowly, “Hyper-gamma Spaces”, one of the instrumentals off the previous Pyramid. An interesting track – I'd call it an instrumental, and it also features the smooth sax of Mel Collins. And it fades.

That takes us to the closer, where another female, this time Lesley Duncan, sings the truly beautiful second ballad, the heart-aching “If I Could Change Your Mind”, with the most breathtaking orchestral work by the Orchestra of the Munich Chamber Opera yet. Gorgeous vocal harmonies, gentle piano, punchy drums that come in just where they're needed to be most effective, and an emotive guitar solo from Bairnson all go to make this one hell of a closer, and one of my top ten APP songs. Interesting and sad thing about Duncan is that she could have been huge, but rather like the Genesis-man-who-never-was, Anthony Philipps, she suffered from chronic stagefright and so never managed to make it big. A real pity, because she has a beautiful, soothing and when needed, powerful and emotional voice, and listening to her is a great way to close this excellent album.

TRACK LISTING

Lucifer
You Lie Down With Dogs
I'd Rather Be a Man
You Won't Be There
Winding Me Up
Damned if I Do
Don't Hold Back
Secret Garden
If I Could Change Your Mind

Without question this goes down as one of my favourite Alan Parsons Project records, but it can in no way be described as progressive rock. Basically it's a collection of pop or pop/rock songs following a theme; a concept album, certainly, but prog rock does not have a monopoly on the concept album, as The Who, among others, will tell you. It's something of a left turn from the previous I Robot, and yet not so much so, and does not in any way presage the opus that was to come the following year, The Turn of a Friendly Card. as the boys went in a more proggy direction for a short time.

It would be another three years before they would have any sort of big hit single though, and until then they would keep plugging away, this album doing well in Europe (probably due to the popularity of “Lucifer” in the clubs) and, rather paradoxically, far better in the USA than it did at home, where it didn't even crack the top forty. They were, however, slowly but surely coming to the notice of the general public, their fame due to peak with the iconic album Eye in the Sky, and then, sadly, to fade away in terms of mainstream success.

Rating: 9.5/10

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bob_32_116

Who were the two on the album cover? Do we know?

Trollheart

Nope.

(Interviewer)
And lastly, were the models for the album cover of Eve made up to appear with lesions, or were these real cases?

(Alan Parsons)
Oh no, they were definitely made up. They were totally beautiful models in every way. I only met one of them, but they were the real thing. We did get some negativity about that cover -- some people said it was anti-feminist.

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Trollheart

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

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The Time Machine (1999)

An appropriate title for an album that bids farewell to the last century, and the last millennium, but an album which I feel failed to capitalise on this on many fronts, full of mostly weak, second-rate songs and without any real direction. Was Parsons losing it? Was this the beginning of the end? After such a strong start to his own solo career, how did he produce this piece of drivel? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that he had virtually no input into the creative process here. While he wrote about half of the previous albums, here he only has a hand in one instrumental, and so how much of an Alan Parsons album is this, and how much is it just, like Dark Side of the Moon, engineered and produced by him? But then again he does play various instruments on it and adds backing vocals. Another may be due to the amount of instrumentals – five in all, six, if you include the bonus tracks – that can only be said to be filling out the album.

It's also a short album. For one with twelve tracks, only four are over five minutes and one over six, and some of the instrumentals are a minute or just slightly over. I remember being massively disappointed with this album, so much so, that I featured it in the “Nice song, Shame About the Album!” section in my journal. Yeah, it's that bad. At least, that's how I remember it. I've never given it a full review so let's see if it really is as poor as I remember.

It kicks off with one of those instrumentals, labelled “The Time Machine Part I” and therefore essentially the title track, with Bairnson's haunting guitar, lush synth and frenetic strings section giving way to a boppy, dancy beat complete with handclap drums and a nice ringing guitar motif. It's certainly reminiscent of previous APP and indeed Alan Parsons solo instrumentals, but it does stand as very much its own animal. It's a good, promising start, with those trumpeting keys we've become so used to hearing playing their part in recreating the Parsons sound. Is it too long, at almost five minutes? I'd have to say no: it doesn't repeat or stretch itself out, and the time is well used to be fair. Fades out nicely and leaves me with the impression this could be another great album, and into “Temporalia”, which is really just a low synth line backing one Professor Frank Close as he rabbits on about the universe. Quite boring really, but there's only a minute of it.

For the first time ever, Spandau Ballet's Tony Hadley takes the mike on an Alan Parsons project, as he helms “Out of the Blue”, again driven on Bairnson's sweet guitar licks; a slower, mid-paced tune which almost fits a a ballad, but not quite. Hadley's voice is of course unmistakable and instantly recognisable; whether it fits on an Alan Parsons song I really can't say. It's a decent song, certainly, with a sense of desperation about it, an almost Thin Lizzy-style guitar solo from Bairnson, though very restrained, and some nice backing vocals too. I think where it begins to go wrong for me then is in “Call Up”, which I truly hate. It's just such a banal lyric, envisaging the return of cultural heroes such as Marvin Gaye and Leonard Cohen, and in effect it's really a reworking, lyrically, of Paul McCartney's “Someone's Knockin' at the Door”. Vocals are taken by Neil Lockwood, who played with my heroes ELO (though the name does not ring any bells) although when he starts singing I could have sworn he was Stevie Wonder!

It's a very funk-based song, with a slick beat and jangly guitar, brass which just about manages to fall into the “Parsons March”, but mostly sounds soul to me; not that there's anything wrong with that, just I'm not used to hearing it on an Alan Parsons album. Not sure it suits. For an Ian Bairnson solo penned track, this is, to quote Fry, weak. Okay, apparently Neil Lockwood was part of ELO Part II, Bev Bevan's offshoot band when he split from Jeff Lynne, so that's why I haven't heard of him. Yeah, the song's that uninteresting that I had time to head off and check out his bio! The next one drags my attention right back though, one of the (few) standouts and the first real ballad. With a soft, simple piano melody backing him, it's pure joy to welcome back Colin Blunstone after so long away, and he is needed. He really brings an extra layer of class to “Ignorance is Bliss”, another Bairnson song, and to his credit Ian holds back the guitar here and lets the piano and synths do their thing. Lovely full backing vocals, and Blunstone is effortlessly perfect as ever. I would count this as probably the best thing Bairnson has ever written, and he even lets loose with a smooth sax solo (he's obviously learned in the interim) which just finishes this most perfect song off to even greater perfection. Just stunning, and the first song that gave me hope that “Call Up” might have been a nasty aberration, and I could look forward to the album leaving that behind and improving from now on.

Sadly, that was not to be the case. Worse awaits. But for now, “Rubber Universe” is a cool funky little instrumental, the first I think that Ian Bairnson has written solo, that cheers with a happy busy little guitar and synth line with I don't know, something like mirambas maybe riffing through it. A good guitar solo – the first proper one I think from Bairnson and followed up with a short sax break (and I mean short: a few notes only) then back into the main melody for a longer sax part about halfway which leads up to another resumption of the main motif but this times stays playing alongside it. Pretty sweet little track really. And it does get better, for now, with an Irish icon making her maiden (sorry) appearance on one of Alan's records, Clannad's Maire (or Moya, if you prefer) Brennan breathing the same amount of effortless class into “The Call of the Wild” as Blunstone does into “Ignorance is Bliss.” It's also a ballad, and very freely based around the old Irish traditional tune “She Moved Through the Fair”, which has also been appropriated before, most famously by Simple Minds for the main melody of the opening section of “Belfast Chlld.”

It's a nice idea in the lyric, a sort of all humanity sticking together thing, perhaps a Gene Roddenberry-style of can't-we-all-just-get-along message, not the worst in the world to espouse I guess. Gorgeous addition of bagpipes (don't say that often) and melodeon to give the song a real ethnic feel, with some powerful string arrangements and a rising guitar solo, just wonderful. That is, however, very nearly it, as the next one up, “No Future in the Past”, written by Stuart Elliot and featuring the return of Neil Lockwood, doesn't do it for me. Again it's too straight-ahead rock for me, with little nuance. It has a decent hook in the chorus, true, and good backing vocals, and it's not a bad song, but it's just not a very good Alan Parsons one, I feel. I also hate the sudden, tail-off ending, and it's into “Press Rewind”, another Elliot vehicle, a slower song with a sort of drab marching fell to it and a descending kind of guitar melody, Meh. Even the return of Graham Dye, who guested on Alan's second solo album can't really lift this song out of the realms of the mediocre.

There's only one vocal track left, but thankfully it's another standout, and another female vocalist, and finally another ballad as Beverly Craven fulfils the last singing duties on the album, backed by again simple piano in a song written by Bairnson about the loss of a beloved pet. “The Very Last Time” is touching and heart-breaking, and might have been a better way to end the album with its simple, honest lines, its gospel-tinged piano marching alongside Craven's soulful voice, the backing vocals also evoking a spiritual oneness, as does the wonderful contribution from the Philharmonia Orchestra, but there are two instrumental left to close us out.

The first is “Far Ago and Long Away”, the second Ian Bairnson instrumental track, and it's characterised by spacy synth and a thick bass line running through the piece, slow and almost menacing in ways, very futuristic, with in fact some sort of chant going through it as well. Does that stop it being an instrumental? I don't think so, personally. It's quite long, over five minutes, very restrained and not quite but almost a drone, changing little throughout its run. The closer then is the bookend to the album, less than two minutes of “The Time Machine (Part 2)”, which reprises the opening instrumental pretty much.

TRACK LISTING

The Time Machine (Part 1)
Temporalia
Out of the Blue
Call Up
Ignorance is Bliss
Rubber Universe
The Call of the Wild
No Future in the Past
Press Rewind
The Very Last Time
Far Ago and Long Away
The Time Machine (Part 2)

In the end then, not the crapfest I remember, but still far below the standard Alan had set for himself, both with his ten albums with the band and with his first two solo albums. The two he released after this are unknown to me: I've never heard a song off either, but so far, though this is not as terrible as I had remembered it to be, it's still far and away the weakest album of the solo era, and in fact I might go so far as to say it's the weakest album including all the Alan Parsons Project releases. It has its moments, and when it shines it really shines brightly, and the instrumentals are, generally, decent, but where it gets let down is by the inclusion of some pretty naff tracks that pull the overall quality down badly.

There's no question Ian Bairnson is a growing talent in songwriting - “Call of the Wild” and “Ignorance is Bliss” prove this, if any proof were needed – and Stuart Elliot can, as Rik Mayall once quipped, bash out a tune or two. But I would have preferred to have seen more input into the writing of his own album by Alan Parsons. In effect, here, he's playing on and producing, for the most part, other people's songs, and it makes it hard – given that he's no singer – to see this as other than an Ian Bairnson album produced by Alan Parsons. I don't know if this state of affairs becomes the norm on his later albums, but if so it will be a pity, as it will have then become harder to think of them as Alan Parsons albums.

I have to say, I couldn't see Eric Woolfson having given over so much control, or allowing it be taken from him.

Rating: 7.9/10

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