Last week, 
Little did I know when I started listening to Pink Floyd that it would lead me to discover a genre totally unbeknownst to me, full of concept albums, strange soundscapes and most of the time... tunes of unusual length.
However, I did not choose Pink Floyd here, but a close friend: Alan Parsons Project whose founding member, Alan Parsons, was the producer on the most Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
Alan Parsons Project could be classified as soft alternative/progressive rock, but they are rather hard to categorize as its mix of progressive and pop did vary greatly along the years. I hope it fits #alternativeweekend.
Here we go!
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The Alan Parsons Project - The Fall of The House of Usher (1976)
Composed of 5 parts, this instrumental suite fills nearly half of the first album of APP, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, that came out in 1976. Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson would look out into literature for inspiration about themes to explore. The Tales were based on Edgar Alan Poe's poetry and, although uncredited, on an opera fragment composed by Claude Debussy, named "La chute de la maison Usher", the exact English translation being the name of the instrumental suite in question here.
The piece is 16:10 and is... very strange, to say the least.
It starts with Orson Welles narration, follows up with pure classical music, later on deviates into strange atonal electronic-sounding territories before ending with catchy pop/rock and classical again.
Even at the time I think it was far from mainstream music ; this is quite a concept album and it takes some time to get used to. The follow-up album, I, Robot would have much more commercial success, but that first record has a Pink Floyd touch I really appreciate.
This is best to (re)-discover on a rainy night, preferably a thunderstorm with lightning strikes, with just a dimmed light by your side... And Edgar Alan Poe's poems nearby!
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The Alan Parsons Project - The Turn of a Friendly Card (1980)
Turn of a Friendly Card focuses on (the excitements and dangers of) gambling and how people use it to escape their boring life. It has plenty of excellent songs and contains a eponymous suite, composed of 5 parts. The first and last part follow perfectly together as one unique piece, sharing again both the name of the suite and the album.
While I like the three intermediate songs, I always long for the last part. As such, I am pretty happy that a gentleman has put Youtube to good use and made one unique track out of it:
There is something here, I am not sure what... The flute? The piano? The beautiful singing? The melancholic, sad, and smart lyrics seamlessly bridging the love of the game and religion? I cannot say for sure, but when the first part reaches its end, with a gong, I always want to immediately rush and move 3 tracks down to the second part.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I refrain myself. But the shivers start immediately once the second part starts: first the violins, then the singing, and finally, after one last Turn of a Friendly Card, a magnificent electric guitar instrumental on top of the piano track. That solo sounds very... Gilmouresque!
If you've read this far, I'm sure I made it clear, but if not, here it goes: this is my number one APP song, ex eaquo with The Same Old Sun. I did not include that last one here however as I think it really would be far fetching to think of it as progressive/alternative (OK, OK, even more than I Wouldn't want to be like you which comes next).
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The Alan Parsons Project - I Wouldn't Want to be Like You
Cover of the vinyl that came out in 1976, courtesy of discogs
A great, somewhat "mysterious" introduction leads to a catchy tune that leans heavily towards pop/rock (but is still categorized as progressive on several websites, so I guess I am fine). The lyrics are simple, easy to remember, which again makes it very catchy.
It came out from I, Robot, the second album, itself an homage to the various Isaac Asimov's Robots novels.
It is really close to mainstream pop/rock, but I wanted to include it here as I wanted to share a unique relationship with it.
Every time I listen to this tune, I have other images in my head though, from a video game: Syndicate Wars, the follow-up to the cult classic Syndicate game. I used to play a pirate version at the time... Please don't judge, it was 1996!
But, what's the relationship with the song? Well, 1996 was still a few years before the advent of the mp3 and other similar music compression formats. Some of the higher budget games did come on CDROMs mixing both data and music tracks. I think it's the CD-ROM/XA format, which allowed multiple different volumes on the same disc.
This way, the game could read game data files installed on the hard drive and music from the disc.
The pirate version had been improved to not need the disc of the game to be inserted, hence I was able to put a music CD instead and the game would always play the disc from the first track whenever a map would load. During that period, I was playing The Best of Alan Parsons Project in loop and had it in my computer CDROM drive all the time. And the first track was I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You. Aha!
So that's why the song and the game are connected to me even though there is no relationship whatsoever between them.
Also, funnily enough, I never heard the original Syndicate Wars theme!