This is the voice of someone who is absolutely, unaffectedly certain of his power in the situation and unafraid of being challenged Woolfson’s glacial delivery is the perfect touch. At its heart the song is a tale of a troubled relationship, but hearing that calm, cool voice stating, ’I am the eye in the sky, looking at you / I can read your mind / I am the maker of rules, dealing with fools / I can cheat you blind.’ might conjure up images of HAL, the control-maddened computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That quiet understatement played a most important role in APP’s musical atmosphere, adding to the emotionally distant air of track #8. The vocals of Eric Woolfson, keyboardist and Parsons’ songwriting partner, are crystal-clear but never overly impassioned, almost as mechanical as the keyboards that constructed walls of sound behind him. #7 is a shorter instrumental that serves mostly as a prelude to the next tune, their greatest hit. Track #1 is one of the very best progressive instrumentals it’s stood the test of time better than concurrent material by King Crimson and Pink Floyd. These tracks reward repeated listenings each new spin reveals a fresh layer of sound and emotion that may have been overlooked before. As a result, their music was more universally accessible than the more abstracted work of Pink Floyd or Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. Parsons and his clan flawlessly blended fusion, disco, soul and rock elements into a distinctive whole. As part of their new Heritage series, Arista has collected eleven of the Alan Parsons Project’s best tracks from seven albums released between 19. Parsons put the profound education he got on the cutting edge of pop music to good use by crafting dense electronic soundscapes for the Project to negotiate.
Parsons had previously been acclaimed for his iconoclastic studio work, engineering the Beatles’ Abbey Road, Wings’ Wildlifeand Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moonand producing pop-rock classics like Al Stewart’s Time Passages. A relative latecomer to the style was the Alan Parsons Project, which became one of the most universally popular prog groups in the post-disco era.
No matter how “progressive rock” is defined, it’s clear that the form reached its first creative peak in the early 70s. The First Wave of progressive rock is generally understood to include influential bands like Yes, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Genesis and Procol Harum, though many will argue that the genre dates even as far back as The Beatles’ Revolver. Since this section is supposed to involve both fusion and progressive music, I thought I'd include something off the beaten path this month.