Finally, a Great Alan Parsons Live Record

Since most rock albums from the radio-and-records era are riddled with overdubs and were never meant to be replicated live, it follows that only a small percentage of bands from that time ever officially released a good live recording. So it would make sense to assume that the ultimate digital-clean studio band of the 70s and 80s, the Alan Parsons Project, would have been hard-pressed to deliver onstage, right?

But what if they had the ambition (and the financing) to make a live record with an orchestra? Procol Harum did, and that album ended up defining their career. The Moody Blues did it twice, with inspiring results. In the fall of 2021, Parsons and the latest incarnation of his band made an epic double-disc album and DVD with the Israel National Orchestra, One Note Symphony – Live In Tel Aviv, streaming at Spotify. That an act this old, let alone one assembled from almost all replacement parts, could pull it off at all is quite a feat. That the songs – some almost a half a century old – could sound so fresh and vigorous is astonishing. And the setlist is killer, weighted heavily by deep cuts rather than the top 40 singalongs.

What’s more, playing with the orchestra ends up exorcising the kind of roteness that inevitably creeps up on a band who’ve been playing the same old hits night after night for decades. Granted, this isn’t the same crew that gave us Pyramid or The Turn of a Friendly Card, but they are definitely committed to recreating a sound originated on instruments that very few musicians use anymore, let alone in concert.

The title song may be a musical joke, but it also seems to be a cautionary tale. While the Alan Parsons Project are best remembered for a long string of singles, they were addressing the dangers of digital technology and surveillance as far back as the mid-70s. “Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” says the voiceover midway through the song: in this context, a word of warning.

In a stroke of serendipity. the orchestra are high in the mix, and their presence ropes in any tendency for the band to go over the top. And yet, they seem to be on a very loose leash: when Jeff Kollman or Dan Tracey’s guitars, or Todd Cooper’s sax, or Tom Brooks’ keys punch in for a flourish or a single bar, it hardly sounds scripted.

The orchestra play the first part of the big guitar solo in Damned If I Do before Kollman gets all shreddy. Interestingly, they don’t play the central synth hook, which mimics an orchestral woodwind section. The strings create an airy bittersweetness that’s been missing in Don’t Answer Me – Parsons’s moment to leave Phil Spector eating his dust – since forever.

Replacement lead singer P.J. Olsson strains to hit the high notes of Time, but the band elevate to an angst-fueled sweep even before the orchestra come in. The big guitars come out for Breakdown, the orchestra leading a triumphantly marching outro. In the global context of early 2022, hearing the crowd spontaneously breaking into a chant of “Freedom, freedom!” will give you chills.

From there they segue into the first Edgar Allan Poe number, The Raven, rising from hazy psychedelia to a peak with band and orchestra going full tilt, “Nevermore, nevermore, never!” A mighty gong hit separates a propulsive Lucifer from a puckishly rearranged, sharply truncated Mammagamma. The high point of the show is the epic Silence And I, which, forty years after it was released, finally gets the arrangement it deserves, from funeral-pillow ballad to Respighi-on-acid stomp.

The first disc winds up with I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You and a surprisingly gospel-inflected, rampaging take of the individualist anthem Don’t Let It Show. The orchestra open disc two with an aptly witchy, deviously metal-tinged version of the famous Dukas classical theme The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The band leap back in with a robust, refreshingly unhurried version of the anthem Standing On Higher Ground, then take a turn into catchy Matt Keating-esque folk rock with As Lights Fall, from the 2019 album The Secret.

I Can’t Get There From Here is not the haunting art-rock song from the Pyramid album but a low-key pop song from The Secret. Brooks’ warped faux-Chopin solo piano interlude that interrupts the big powerpop anthem Prime Time is bizarre, but the diptych of Sirius and Eye in the Sky gets transformed into an art-rock rollercoaster.

Old and Wise doesn’t have the luscious Procol Harum organ that the 90s version of the band used, but it does have one of the most dynamic arrangements here. A hard-edged, funky take of (The System Of) Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether makes a good setup up for the requisite Games People Play. How much does nostalgia play in this appreciation? Hell, at this point in history, anything from before March of 2020 sounds better than ever.

I, Robot? Not Alan Parsons!

It’s the last night of the tour, in a midsize sit-down theatre somewhere in Holland. The bandleader is the lone holdover from the original group, and he’s neither the lead instrumentalist nor their regular frontman.

Throughout a demanding set long enough to fill two cds, the band careen through an impressively diverse mix of Pink Floyd-influenced art-rock, expansively elegant ballads and singalong anthems which the audience seem to know well. That’s no surprise, considering that many of these songs received incessant radio airplay back in the day when that was the key driver of album sales.

While many of the arrangements are new, and fresh, to match the cast onstage, the band are roadweary. Some numbers, particularly the most dystopic ones, feature a sequencer, which ends up backfiring. The longer the song goes on, the further the players drift apart, to the point where everybody’s in his own individual time zone. How ironic, and amusing, that an Alan Parsons band – harshly critiqued for a cold, digital, studio-clean esthetic – could sound so haphazard onstage

The crowning irony is that this is nothing new. The original Alan Parsons Project that finally began touring in the 90s was a beast of a live band, and took all kinds of chances, and this particular group share that fearlessness if not the same sizzle and majesty. A third irony is that while the group’s 1995 Live album also fails to capture the band’s intrepid improvisational side, this one – The Never Ending Show: Live in the Netherlands, streaming at Spotify – does, even if it’s pretty untight in places. Seriously: if you’re a fan of the band, wouldn’t you want to hear them fly completely without a net? Isn’t that what live music is all about?

Tellingly, it takes two guitarists – Jeff Kollman and Dan Tracey – to compensate for the absence of Ian Bairnson, one of the most underrated and versatile shredders of the art-rock era. The clockwork rhythm section of bassist David Paton and drummer Stuart Elliott is long gone, but new drummer Danny Thompson can really swing, and has a flair for the unexpected, which is great. He also speeds up and slows down, not always matched by bassist Guy Erez, who may not be able to hear him in the monitors.

The original band relied on a rotating cast of singers until keyboardist Eric Woolfson – whose Edgar Allan Poe song cycle improbably springboarded a long run of concept albums – more or less took over as lead singer. Here, P.J. Olsson and Parsons himself are flinty and weathered; Jordan Asher Huffman is an upgrade on the songs originally assigned to raspier vocalists.

This is not the place to discover the Parsons catalog. Newcomers should start with their arguably most symphonic and ambitious record, 1981’s Turn of a Friendly Card and work forward through Eye in the Sky and the erratic Ammonia Avenue, the two successive chapters in Woolfson’s gloomy existentialist triptych. But for longtime fans, there’s a lot to like here, and the unevenness is more endearing than exasperating. I, Robot? Not Alan Parsons!

Don’t Answer Me – the crushingly cynical, Lynchian pop ballad where Parsons managed to one-up Phil Spector – is more stripped-down here, and not as emotionally searing as earlier versions of the band would play it. Likewise, Tom Brooks’ Procol Harum organ on Old and Wise and Don’t Let It Show is tantalizingly lurid…and fleeting.

But his playful jazz piano break on Primetime is plenty outside-the-box. And the vocals on the powerpop hit Breakdown – which segues into a moodily restrained version of The Raven – are a vast improvement. Us and Them Time drifts calmly toward a distant doom, without Bairnson’s loud slide guitar. The instrumental Luciferama is a mashup of Lucifer and Mammagamma, more psychedelic funk than motorik theme, guitars front and center.

Surprisingly, the art-funk hits are where the gremlins rear their heads. There are also four more recent songs. Three are quite good on face value: one sounds a lot like Matt Keating, another is a bluegrass-inflected folk-pop ballad, both of them somberly contemplating posterity. The vaudevillian-tinged title track is part late 60s Kinks, part Moody Blues. The song that kicks off the album sounds suspiciously satirical: check the title. Parsons seems to be the last person who wants to see the world under silicon-fisted technocratic rule.