Alan Parsons Project

Eve

Not one of his best

Review Score:

(6/10)
Not every album deserves 5 stars. Giving high rankings to everything by one artist dilutes the value of the 5 (or even 4) star rating.

This album is a little different than other Parsons albums. It is more song oriented and relies less on the spacy, driving progressive instrumental interludes. It starts out strong, especially with You Lie Down With Dogs and I'd Rather Be a Man, but gets weak in the middle. I find the one hit from this album (Damned If I Do) to be just annoying. But that is the way with most hits. They are usually the weakest material on the album. They hummable and stick in your mind and appeal to the lowest common denominator. Some of the other songs are bland and boring, like Don't Hold Back. But the album ends strongly with If I Could Change Your Mind.

This is Parson's fourth album. It isn't bad, it just isn't as good as the first two (Tales of Mystery and Imagination and I Robot) or the sixth (Eye in the Sky). It is certainly better than the lame concept album about gambing (Turn of a Friendly Card).

Parsons was a studio engineer who worked on the Beatles' Abbey Road and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. He "formed" the Alan Parsons Project which is basically material written by Parsons and Eric Woolfson and performed mostly by studio musicians. Parsons is the concept album king. Each album revolves around some concept. Sometimes it works and sometimes if fails miserably. This album has a looser concept than most. All the songs are about women, but nothing deeper than that. Some have misinterpreted this as being degrading to women, but it is actually a fairly positive album. It is just that most of the songs are not very strong, and the music isn't good enough to compensate for it.

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