I’m pulling an early shift at work
this week, and the combination of not feeling 100% healthy and the odd hours
leaves me feeling strange and fuzzy-headed.
This is perhaps the best frame of mind for this next review, though.
Disc 409 is…Tales of Mystery and Imagination:
Edgar Allan Poe
Artist: The Alan Parsons
Project
Year of Release: 1976
What’s up with the Cover? A pretty cool cover.
It has that old and leathery manuscript feel, and combined with the line
drawing and inset photo of someone wrapped head to toe in tape, captures the
creepy world of Edgar Allan Poe perfectly.
Then, separating the album title is a futuristic picture of pillars and
a plain stretching away that looks like it was drawn with painstaking care on a
very primitive computer, which captures the bizarre synth world of the Allan
Parsons Project perfectly.
How I Came To Know It: Sheila put me on to
this album, after it was introduced to her by a coworker who knew that I
enjoyed concept albums. I had never
heard of it prior to that point, although I obviously knew who the Alan Parsons
Project were from their one hit, “Eye In
the Sky.” That song does not appear
here.
How It Stacks Up: We have three Allan Parsons Project albums, and they
are all pretty strange. I’d say this one
is the second best, although I like all of them in their own way.
Rating: 2 stars.
“Tales of Mystery and
Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe” (mercifully
referred to from here in as “Tales”) is the kind of big beautiful mess that
could never happen in the modern record industry, and this knowledge leaves me
both relieved and sad.
The album is the creation of
prog/concept rockers, the Alan Parsons Project, a group of studio musician
types and producers that came together to basically compose whatever the hell
they wanted, at a time when the music industry indulged that sort of thing.
Later these guys would be heavily
driven by synthesizers, and although it is only 1976, they gamely work early
synth into these tracks as well as liberally altered piano and string
arrangements. They use these instruments
to try to evoke the fantastic and disturbing tales of 19th century
writer Edgar Allan Poe, and the whole album is a series of songs that
reinterpret various Poe stories to music.
The music is a prototype of their
later eighties synth sound, and well ‘ahead’ of what else was going on in 1976
in terms of its smooth and seamless production.
Most rock musicians wouldn’t be doing this sort of thing until 1981 or
1982, with ethereal guitar mixed with synth piano and those high, airy rock
vocals that strangely passed for manly in the day.
The whole album has a sort of
eighties soundtrack feel which is well put together, but out of place with the
subject matter. It reminded me strongly
of watching that old eighties fantasy film “Ladyhawke” starring Rutger Hauer
and Michelle Pfeiffer. The movies was a
film that took place in the middle ages, but every time a scene called for a
little evocative music, the score sounded like some kid messing around with the
beat function on his Casio keyboard.
“Tales” is not quite so bad, and
if anything it is a marvel that the Alan Parson Project (mercifully to be
called APP from here in) is able to capture 19th century Gothic
horror at all with this style of music. Yet
they do it, especially in the quiet moments where they rely on the strings and
piano to do their work without excess interference.
The problem with those moments is that
it is just like listening to a good movie score, only without the benefit of
the movie. When the songs are jazzed up
a bit with some proto-disco beats and synth they sound a lot more interesting,
but are now desperately out of place with their subject matter.
I’ll give the APP some credit
though, when they come up with an idea, they stick with it faithfully. They throw every dreary, mood-inducing sound
they can throw into these songs, including rain, thunder and on two separate
occasions, long narrated passages from Orson freakin’ Welles. In one of these Welles goes on at length quoting
Poe (I think) discussing the relationship between music and poetry. As an avowed music geek I was a little embarrassed
by how much I enjoyed that part.
The APP boys cover a good run of
Poe tales, including songs based on favourites like “The Raven”, “The Tell-Tale
Heart,” “the Cask of Amontillado” and “the Fall of the House of Usher.” Regrettably they skip one of my favourite
stories, “Berenice” which is about the guy who murders his wife but keeps her pretty
white teeth in a box rattling around to remind him of her. If ever a story called for some piano synth this
would be it.
“The Raven” is by far the best track, which begins in glorious
anachronistic fashion with synth-altered voice singing lines from the poem, and
then transforms into a prog rock song filled with organ and odd drum beats, and
big, atmospheric guitar sounds that Pink Floyd themselves might not have
thought to come up with. In addition to
being beautifully weird, “The Raven”
is easy on the ears – even enjoyable.
Not so, “The Tell-Tale Heart” which sounds like something out of Phantom of
the Opera crossed with the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I have no doubt APP
band members had seen a few times. Although
it could be catchy, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
sounds too much like a character singing dialogue in a stage play for me to
enjoy it.
Better is the “Cask of Amontillado” which retells the
Poe classic about a man who murders his rival by walling him up in the
basement, on the pretext of sharing a cask of wine with him. Poe keeps the tale of murder worse through the
distant and gleeful tone the narrator employs in retelling it. The APP use slow-paced high harmonies of both
the narrator and the tearful pleas of his victim, Fortunado, played against
occasional frantic violin sets to accomplish the same thing. It is more music for music nerds, yes, but
that doesn’t make it bad.
The fourth stand-alone song is “(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor
Fether” is based on a story I was unfamiliar with, and the song is one I
wish I were still unfamiliar with. The
music sounds like a combination of Pink Floyd guitar, the Beatles at their
silliest and a Pepsi commercial jingle.
The latter half of the album sees
the APP boys go all the way down into the rabbit hole, with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a
twenty minute instrumental geek fest with five movements, including such
classically named silliness as “III: Intermezzo.” This song is a huge mess of classical
constructions, synthesized production layering and what seems like a hundred
instruments. The worst part about it is
that I kind of liked it. Not so much to
say it was a “best tracks” moment, but enough to be embarrassed that I was
drawn in by the APP’s weird, wonderful, inspirational effort.
This album is not for everyone,
but if you like to be challenged by musicians who aren’t afraid to take an idea
and run a weird marathon with it, then it’s worth a listen.
Best tracks: The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado.
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