My not so glowing review of The Alan Parsons Project’s album, Stereotomy is now up on Feminist Review:
“Where’s the walrus?” was the question posed by an old friend of band members Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson about the lack of Beatles-esque verve in the band’s previous albums, Ammonia Avenue and Vulture Culture. The question later became one of the track titles on Stereotomy, serving as an answer, “Here it is.”
Unlike Magical Mystery Tour, however, the walrus was nowhere to be found in the album.
Stereotomy finds the Alan Parsons Project getting deep in metaphor with lyrics like, “Too many windmills in my way” and “Make me a rock and not what I appear to be,” none of which made a lasting impression on my musical experience, nor a lot of poetic sense. The main impression I got from Stereotomy was the band’s rather contrived attempt to make some rather bland, synthesizer-infused progressive rock grandiose and profound mostly via the choice of album title. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, “stereotomy” sounds more like a word only a physical chemistry teacher would know.
Read the rest here.
Alicia Izharuddin 