THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION

If my previous reviews on Kansas and VDGG were examples of a good compilations up to my taste, this - and each APP compilation I've seen - only reminds of the awful commercial single hit point of view, as opposed to my approach where 'the best' are hardly ever single- potential songs. All in all a large deal of Alan Parsons Project is more or less dull 'engineer- music' and many of its pop songs come closer to disco than prog, and yet it has three nearly excellent albums plus some partly enjoyable albums. If I had my way, I'd absolutely avoid those monotonous pop tunes such as 'You don't believe', 'Snake eyes', 'Prime time' etc and concentrate especially on the first three albums and choose better tracks from later albums (if there ARE at all any good ones in e.g. Stereotomy or Vulture Culture, I don't know).

If I had come to APP via these compilations, I'd probably never got interested to listen more of it - and I would have lost some fine music. My favourite APP album is Tales of Mystery and Imagination (the Poe theme helps the fact!) but the edition of this 2-cd collection I borrowed yesterday has none from it. The representation of Pyramid album comes closest to meet my taste, even without the lovely 'Shadow of the Lonely Man', but also its worst tracks have been included.

I think APP have chosen their regular singers badly: I almost hate Lenny Zakatek and Chris Rainbow, and Eric Woolfson himself is also a weak singer (these singers dominate this collection).