I don’t know if you remember 1984, but 1984 was a very style
over substance time. Everything seemed to be about image, flash,
and flair. Not a good time to put out a progressive rock CD, but
Alan Parsons and company found a neat way to get around that.
They didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I have some soft spots in my heart for the
1984 release from the Alan Parsons Project,
Vulture Culture, but if the gods came down and threatened me
with a lightning strike unless I gave up one Project CD, I’d fling
this one in the divine dustbin so fast it would leave skidmarks.
Vulture Culture is, fundamentally, a flawed work with only a few
good bits. For the first time, APP takes on a theme they can’t
manage to handle; that of the fact that we all feed off one
another, that all societies are, at their heart, parasitical. Deep
— so deep, in fact, that the album’s shallowness leaves the theme
beached like a whale who left the map at home.
Production and engineering is, as always, crisp, clear, and
flawless. Sad fact is, though, that that flawless production
reveals the flaws in the compositions themselves. Songs like
“Separate Lives” and “Sooner Or Later” end up sounding like the
unholy mating of Parsons’ immaculate synths with bubblegum pop. The
word I keep coming back to is shallow; I can only assume that
continued pressure from Arista Records after the modest chart
successes of
Eye In The Sky and
Ammonia Avenue resulted in a more pop-oriented sound — a
sound that just doesn’t work. Andrew Powell’s orchestral sound is
completely absent on
Vulture Culture, and the traditional Project sound goes
right out the window with it.
There are a few good moments. “Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)”
is one of the greatest songs the Project ever recorded, a
brilliant, textured, and complex ballad in the middle of a field of
mostly banal lyrics and uninspired arrangements. “Let’s Talk About
Me” has a few good moments, mostly in the pounding percussion of
Stuart Elliot. “The Same Old Sun” is a Broadway-style ballad,
similar in feel and in quality to “Shadow Of A Lonely Man” from
Pyramid. Unfortunately, that’s only three tracks, and even
if you count the instrumental (“Hawkeye”, which for being somewhat
average still has a great saxophone part) that’s only half a CD.
It’s not precisely that
Vulture Culture is bad, it’s just that Parsons could do
much, much better. (I do still wonder how much of the CD’s sound is
record company meddling.)
Vulture Culture can only be recommended to the completist.
In the end, the record company may have fed off itself, and killed
any chance the Project had of three CDs with American chart
success.
