I don’t know if you remember 1984, but 1984 was a very style
\nover substance time. Everything seemed to be about image, flash,
\nand flair. Not a good time to put out a progressive rock CD, but
\nAlan Parsons and company found a neat way to get around that.<\/p>\n
They didn’t.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong. I have some soft spots in my heart for the
\n1984 release from the Alan Parsons Project,
\nVulture Culture<\/i>, but if the gods came down and threatened me
\nwith a lightning strike unless I gave up one Project CD, I’d fling
\nthis one in the divine dustbin so fast it would leave skidmarks.
\nVulture Culture is, fundamentally, a flawed work with only a few
\ngood bits. For the first time, APP takes on a theme they can’t
\nmanage to handle; that of the fact that we all feed off one
\nanother, that all societies are, at their heart, parasitical. Deep
\n— so deep, in fact, that the album’s shallowness leaves the theme
\nbeached like a whale who left the map at home.<\/p>\n
Production and engineering is, as always, crisp, clear, and
\nflawless. Sad fact is, though, that that flawless production
\nreveals the flaws in the compositions themselves. Songs like
\n“Separate Lives” and “Sooner Or Later” end up sounding like the
\nunholy mating of Parsons’ immaculate synths with bubblegum pop. The
\nword I keep coming back to is shallow; I can only assume that
\ncontinued pressure from Arista Records after the modest chart
\nsuccesses of
\nEye In The Sky<\/i> and
\nAmmonia Avenue<\/i> resulted in a more pop-oriented sound — a
\nsound that just doesn’t work. Andrew Powell’s orchestral sound is
\ncompletely absent on
\nVulture Culture<\/i>, and the traditional Project sound goes
\nright out the window with it.<\/p>\n
There are a few good moments. “Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)”
\nis one of the greatest songs the Project ever recorded, a
\nbrilliant, textured, and complex ballad in the middle of a field of
\nmostly banal lyrics and uninspired arrangements. “Let’s Talk About
\nMe” has a few good moments, mostly in the pounding percussion of
\nStuart Elliot. “The Same Old Sun” is a Broadway-style ballad,
\nsimilar in feel and in quality to “Shadow Of A Lonely Man” from
\nPyramid<\/i>. Unfortunately, that’s only three tracks, and even
\nif you count the instrumental (“Hawkeye”, which for being somewhat
\naverage still has a great saxophone part) that’s only half a CD.
\nIt’s not precisely that
\nVulture Culture<\/i> is bad, it’s just that Parsons could do
\nmuch, much better. (I do still wonder how much of the CD’s sound is
\nrecord company meddling.)<\/p>\n
\nVulture Culture<\/i> can only be recommended to the completist.
\nIn the end, the record company may have fed off itself, and killed
\nany chance the Project had of three CDs with American chart
\nsuccess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":26786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5840],"rating":[11204],"class_list":["post-38059","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-alan-parsons-project","rating-rating-c-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=38059"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=38059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}