THE SICILIAN DEFENCE

In 1979, Alan Parson and his Project partner Eric Woolfson were dissatisfied with their current contract with Arista. Feeling like they'd been taken for a ride, they decided to rapidly knock something out in a hurry to deliver to the label along with Eve - thereby giving them two albums at once and wrapping up their contractual requirements as a gambit to get Arista to the negotiating table.

In the long run, this led to a new deal, and a happier Parsons and Woolfson going away to put out The Turn of a Friendly Card, which would be something of a return to form after the patchy Eve. As for The Sicilian Defence, it was stuck in the vault, eventually getting an official release as part of the Complete Albums Collection boxed set. Previously, Alan Parsons had been very against it getting a release, though Woolfson had put out one of its tracks as a bonus track on something, and Parsons eventually relented for the sake of making sure that box was as complete as the name implied.

So, what do you get on here? There's an extent to which this is "APP Goes Tangerine Dream", with synth-based tracks sounding much like the output of Edgar Froese's merry band (or, for that matter, Jean-Michel Jarre) as of the close of the 1970s. Other tracks resort to acoustic piano instrumentals, played in a charming and graceful fashion. Indeed, initially the tracks seem to alternate synthesiser/acoustic/synthesiser/acoustic - in keeping with the concept of a chess game with alternating sides taking their turns - though the pattern ends up breaking by the fifth track. (The chess moves in the title tracks are legitimate, and to my eyes set up a situation where black ends up in quite a strong position - it's the "Classical Variation" on the Sicilian Defence, hence perhaps the classical music influences on the instrumentals which get teased out as the album progresses.)

Certainly, though it was blitzed through in three days as a contractual obligation piece, there was at least some effort put into this: if you just want to fill 40 minutes of tape there's faster and easier ways of doing it, after all, but I guess professional pride (and the risk that the record company might actually call their bluff and release the thing) forced Parsons and Woolfson to produce something which had just a little polish to it. That said, there's a certain repetitiveness to the whole thing - each track is fairly clearly based on a fairly limited set of musical ideas which the duo vamp on until they've hit enough time.

If you are hoping for something like the Project's other albums, you can more or less rule it out - at most this is a collection of sketches of tunes which might have become Alan Parsons Project albums given a little more time to percolate and develop. On the other hand, if the idea of a more raw, stripped-back approach of just Parson and Woolfson noodling through some musical ideas appeals, then there's something to enjoy here.