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.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

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 , ...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...

Old Enough to Forget

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