★★★★★
This isn't going to be one of those articles that declare the entire Alan Parsons Project (APP) back catalogue to be a lost gem - a hidden treasure trove of music that has far-reaching influences that are only now becoming apparent. Well, I may be doing the latter. However, one of the most peculiar aspects of evaluating the output of Alan Parsons Project, especially as it's now collected for the first time in one set, is how popular it was at the time...
- thequietus.com
2014-05-06
★★★★★
The Alan Parsons Project is an interesting anomaly in pop culture history. The outfit is an anomaly because it was a sort of progressive rock band or art rock band that made concept albums chiefly during the late '70s and early '80s, a time when most dinosaur rock bands of similar ilk were either adapting to new sounds (Rush, Genesis) or were going the way of the dodo (Emerson, Lake & Palmer)...
- www.popmatters.com
2013-12-04
★★★★★
Alan Parsons was an engineer and producer for some of the greatest bands in the world like The Beatles and Pink Floyd before deciding to start his own Project and create remarkable musical soundscapes. Turn of a Friendly Card is his fifth release and in my opinion the last great Alan Parsons Project album.It begins with a regal and majestic opening, befitting the regal aspect of the face cards in a playing card deck. This leads to the excellent Elmer Gantry sung "May Be a Price to Pay...
- www.prognaut.com
2010-09-19
★★★★★
I might agree that the way this record approximates what it (supposedly) criticizes is a species of profundity if what it (supposedly) criticized was schlock. As it is, the pseudo-disco makes Giorgio Moroder sound like Eno and the pseudo-sci-fi makes Isaac Asimov seem like a deep thinker. Back to the control board.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-17
★★★★★
Musically, this is a step toward schlock that knows its name--a few smarmy melodies mixed in with the production values and synthesizer furbelows. Thematically, it's both sophomoric and disgusting--programmatic misogyny rooted in sexual rejections that were clearly deserved. Visually, it's sadistic--the three women on the Hipgnosis cover wear black veils that only partly conceal their scars, warts and blotches. What is it they stencil on street corners? Castrate art rockers?
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
The four albums that comprise 'Phase One' of the expanded and remastered re-release of the entirety of the Alan Parsons Project may still jog the memory of a few old hippies as the stuff you turned on between Pink Floyd releases, but for younger listeners, the most obvious reference is the use of the outfit's name as Dr Evil's 'death ray' in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, appropriately enough considering how often their output suggests aural death through bloated pomposity...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2009-06-12
★★★★★
You would expect a record that is the brainchild of a pair of producers to succeed more on technical grounds than creative ones. True to form, the latest "concept" album by the Alan Parsons Project founders miserably in its own overearnest art-rock poetasting...
- www.rollingstone.com
2009-06-08
★★★★★
The year's silliest record by a best-selling act, Eve purports to be a song cycle evoking Woman, yet the portrait thrown up by this 3-D space-rock oratorio is of some whory Victorian witch in a leather headdress flicking her garter belt and hissing curses. "I'd rather be a man than sin my soul like you do," announces David Paton, playing one of the LP's four male accusers. "You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas," spits another. That about sums up Eve's sexual politics...
- www.rollingstone.com
2009-06-08
★★★★★
I Robot is a blood banquet for automatons that is infused with the airy, romantic sentimentalism of pop music. The contradiction works well up to a point: it takes the coldbloodedness out of the synthesizer's greasy moan and adds a bit of humanism to it. But the final result is a tantara for the ultimate sensuality of the technocratic brat and his hardware.Most scaramouchs of the synthesizer tend to become a bit overbearing simply because they lack an honest understanding of machine texturing ?...
- www.rollingstone.com
2009-06-08
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