The Alan Parsons Project - Eye in the Sky

Eye in the Sky was about as good as it got for The Alan Parsons Project. The band had been building up to something and they got close with their previous albums, Eve and Turn of a Friendly Card. "Games People Play" remains one of my favourite songs, and Ian Bairnson's guitar solo is right up there with the best of the best. Eye in the Sky went double platinum here in Canada.

The band was never a band, it was aptly titled a project and it was centred on Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons. The two wrote the songs, and Parsons engineered and produced and would bring in vocalists as required.

Of course, over the span of their career the singers would be consistent, names like Chris Rainbow, Lenny Zakatek (who should have had a solo career) and Elmer Gantry. There were others of course, but I run the risk of having to pull out a bunch of records and start reading credits. As to credits, the vinyl copy I found was missing the insert which sucked. The vinyl cleaned up okay which was nice.

Eric Woolfson sang a lot of the hits, which I suppose was fair as he wrote the songs. The big one here was the title track. It's funny, I played this album a lot back in the day and it's remarkable how much I'd forgotten until I dropped the needle. The opening instrumental "Sirius" that segues into "Eye in the Sky" is phenomenal, and I'm surprised the two weren't paired more often. The other song I'd forgotten on the first side was the closing track "Silence and I," a composition sung by Mister Woolfson. That orchestral bridge is awesome.

The second side featured another instrumental, "Mammagamma" that I always liked. However, it was "Psychobabble" that remains one of the best tracks on the album. It wasn't always that way. It was good, but something about it irritated me. My dear dead Dave loved the song. He'd heard it on a friend's high end stereo cranked and he said it was AMAZING. When he came to visit we played it on my little Lloyd's stereo. We pushed the volume to where it was clipping and while it was loud it wasn't the rapturous experience he'd had previously.

Over forty years later, I'm in the basement and no one else is home and I have a decent pair of Mission speakers and a good sub and I'm rattling the windows, and I've gotta say ... it's AMAZING. I'm pretty sure the air raid siren wasn't appreciated by the neighbours. Hats off again to the ever dependable and tasty Ian Bairnson for killing it on the solo.

The album closes with a strange ballad, "Old and Wise," a song that even when I was a teenager resonated with me. Now that I'm no longer a teenager it hits a little deeper. It's a pretty song.

This was the peak for the band, although I didn't know it at the time. They were a bigger deal in Canada than they were in the US, and I'd continue buying their albums through to Gaudi in '87. There was always something worthwhile on each record, and while if I'm being honest much of Eye in the Sky is sort of soft rock middle of the road stuff, when it's good, it's extraordinary and it makes everything else seem more better.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...

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