TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION

It of course, is not the first time someone sets his "project" on a known concept or character outside the strict musical environment. So this review will focus on the music rather than the concept; wich of course is embedded in the same. So music wise, this work is quiet daring.

For starters, it delivers for the first time Alan Parsons' already established high tech quality- engineering skills, into his own pen-written album. Very creative music compositions that move in very opposite grounds, melting these differences with ingenious studio-effects and arrangements. So everything flows naturally. Even if the ambitious goal is pretentious, the result is invinting.

And once you feel comfortable with this Rock/Pop/Prog language, the project detours into an amazing closedown, with a quiet more daring long-timed composition: "The Fall of the House of the Usher" a more "classical music/structure", leaded by the "Project's" accomplice: Erick Woolfson, which own work is closer to those aesthetics.

Add to that; good songs and arrangements. (APP´s later lyrics will never be this relevant, so, by adapting E.A. Poe's poems it turned out to be a relief for him and us. imo.) MUSIC-wise, this work is fun, well performed and exquisitely accomplished.

..Good things grow well with age. Even the songs that are now well known to be Alan Parson's commercial song writing style, still sound interesting in this specific project, as pieces of a "whole" and at that time this kind of APP's "Pop/Rock" language was still more prog-related and "fresh" ( less-corny) than his later works.

****4 "Great-listening experience in High-Tech Studio conditions" PA Stars!