Archive for October 3rd, 2013
Review: The Alan Parsons Project, “I Robot: Legacy Edition”
How to follow an art-rock concept album based on the macabre tales of nineteenth-century author Edgar Allan Poe? For The Alan Parsons Project, the answer was apparently a simple one: look forward rather than back. So the second album by the progressive-rock “group” – in actuality producer-engineer Parsons, chief songwriter-executive producer Eric Woolfson, and a rotating cast of musicians and vocalists – was inspired by the writing of Isaac Asimov and explored artificial intelligence in a sci-fi landscape. I Robot (not to be confused, for legal purposes, with Asimov’s I, Robot, though the author gave the Project’s project his blessing) bested the No. 38 placing of the Poe-based Tales of Mystery and Imagination on the Billboard 200 by hitting No. 9. That was no small feat for an ambitious prog-rock opus in the pop-and-disco-dominated days of 1977. Now, the APP’s Arista debut I Robot has arrived from Legacy Recordings in a 2-CD Legacy Edition with 14 bonus tracks, 9 of which are previously unreleased. This edition supplants a 2007 single-disc remaster as it contains the original five bonus tracks from that reissue.
The future depicted in I Robot via the album’s ten tracks – six vocal songs and four largely instrumental compositions, all credited to Woolfson and Parsons – is a rather dark one, even if the title of one anthemic track proclaims that “Day After Day (The Show Must Go On).” The lyrics are more concerned with mood and feeling rather than advancing a particular story, but are focused on the relationship between man and his robotic creations. Woolfson, who died in 2009, wrote in 2006 as reprinted in the liner notes, “I Robot to some extent looks at the questions and the extent to which as human beings we may or may not be pre-programmed and act in a robotic fashion, as well as the dangers of uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence.” It’s heady stuff, and the album revels in progressive pomp. But it’s all played with impeccable musicianship not to mention earnestness and seriousness. In other words, I Robot wholly avoids the trap of camp despite the frequently operatic writing. Comparisons to Pink Floyd are inevitable, particularly as Parsons famously engineered Dark Side of the Moon, and there’s a certain similarity in the grandiosity of it all not to mention the instrumentation; Parsons admits in his new liner notes here that the title track of I Robot was inspired by the Floyd’s use of the EMS Synthi-A synth sequencer. But I Robot showed The Alan Parsons Project establishing a less lysergic, more cosmic sound of its own, with multiple singers and varied textures placed in both rock-based and orchestral veins.
Read on after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »
Morello Reissues The Electric Prunes’ “Mass” and “Oath” On One CD
Cherry Red’s Morello label has taken a break from its usual diet of classic country – think: the legendary likes of George Jones, Marty Robbins and Charley Pride – to bring two titles from the psych-rockers The Electric Prunes back into print. The label has paired The Prunes’ 1968 David Axelrod-produced albums Mass in F Minor and Release of an Oath on one CD which is now available.
Composed and arranged by the maverick Axelrod – on loan from Capitol Records – Mass in F Minor is perhaps best-remembered today for its opening track, “Kyrie Eleison.” Axelrod’s composition – translated as “Lord, have mercy” and a psychedelic resetting of an important Christian prayer – earned a measure of cinematic immortality when it was used in the film Easy Rider. But “Kyrie” and Mass weren’t the work of the same Electric Prunes who scored a No. 11 Pop hit with the 1967 nugget “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night).” The band’s original line-up of Ken Williams (guitar), Jim Lowe (vocals/autoharp), Mark Tulin (bass) and Michael Weakley (drums) was in a near-constant state of flux since its signing to Reprise Records. Even that hit single lacked the participation of Weakley and added James Spagnola on guitar and Preston Ritter on drums. During the recording of Mass, the band splintered again, and Jim Lowe once commented that “Axelrod was so far above what we as a garage band were able to deliver.” Mass – with other segments of Axelrod’s religious service including “Gloria,” “Credo,” “Sanctus,” “Benedictus” and “Agnus Dei” – was completed by members of The Collectors and various session musicians. An iteration of the “real” Prunes attempted to play the complex album onstage, but a planned tour was cancelled after just one performance.
Seemingly undeterred, producer Dave Hassinger and arranger-composer Axelrod persevered with another spiritually-inclined album to follow up Mass under The Electric Prunes’ name. Read about it after the jump. Plus: order links and full track listings! Read the rest of this entry »