Alan Parsons is back, that’s the good news. And the bad news? There really isn’t any. Parsons has jettisoned some of his “classic rock” sound and stepped firmly and unquestionably into the 21st century. The result is an album that will hopefully gain Parsons a whole new audience – and considering how much of his longtime fanbase was attracted to the sound of Parsons routinely going further out than the cutting edge 30 years ago, A Valid Path should also be a treat for the folks like me who’ve been hanging around since the 1970s.
And A Valid Path does surprise me in a few places. After those three decades hiding behind the mixing board or a variety of instruments or processing his vocals through a vocoder, Alan Parsons steps out into the limelight and takes a turn at a lead vocal with “We Play The Game”, and lo and behold, the guy’s got a hell of a voice, and it’s almost as smooth as former Alan Parsons Project cohort Eric Woolfson’s. Why he didn’t just come out and sing a long time ago is a mystery. If anything, it’s the one track that most solidly resembles classic Parsons.
There are other links to the past, too. But from the pre-release publicity going into this album’s release, it almost sounded like Parsons was decisively moving away from anything he’d done in the past, with this album’s focus on electronica. P.J. Olsson mixed most of the album, and lent a hand on several tracks, and there are guest appearances by Shpongle, The Crystal Method, Uberzone and Nortec Collective. Even more omipresent than Olsson is Parsons’ son Jeremy, who forges a couple of the albums’ strongest links to the past with from-the-ground-up remakes of classic Project tracks “Mammagamma” (as “Mammagamma ’04”) and the album-opening duo of “Dream Within A Dream” and “The Raven” from the very first Project album (as “A Recurring Dream Within A Dream”). The only people on the album that Parsons has worked with before are David Pack, who co-writes and provides heavily processed vocals on “You Can Run”, and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, giving a six-string assist to the opening track, “Return To Tunguska”.
That doesn’t mean that you won’t hear from folks you’re familiar with, though. Of all people, John Cleese briefly appears on the final track, “Chomolungma” (which is a rather obscure local name for Mount Everest, in case you’re wondering). This percussion-heavy track instantly earns a place in the pantheon of Parsons’ widescreen-ready instrumentals, and Cleese doesn’t even show up until nearly seven minutes into the not-quite-eight-minute track.
The much-publicized “electronica” angle can be a bit misleading, though. Olsson’s “More And More Lost Without You” is electronica, but it’s electronica with layers of twangy guitar on top of it. The instrumental “Tijuaniac” is surprisingly jazzy (though Parsons is no stranger to electronic-heavy jazz with such numbers as “Where’s The Walrus?” and “Urbania” in his back catalogue), and “L’Arc En Ciel” is thick with soaring guitar solos. Parsons may have cast off some of his classic-rock-radio-specific sounds, such as the 70s-style electric piano tones that he incorporated as recently as 1993’s post-Project comeback Try Anything Once, but he still brings a lot of the classic rock sensibility to the table, and hearing that together with a genre of music that seems to have an inherent youthfulness about it is an interesting step forward.
Parsons once said in an interview that he’s always making music for today’s listeners, and A Valid Path certainly seems to back that up – but it also doesn’t have anything that’ll alienate long-time listeners who have appreciated Parsons’ constant walk along the cutting edge. Even if you’re chafing at the electronica label, give it a shot – it’s not as far removed from Parsons’ previous works as you might think, and it’s got some fantastic music on it.
- Return To Tunguska (8:49)
- More Lost Without You (3:21)
- Mammagamma ’04 (5:07)
- We Play The Game (5:35)
- Tijuaniac (5:30)
- L’Arc En Ciel (5:21)
- A Recurring Dream Within A Dream (4:12)
- You Can Run (3:53)
- Chomolungma (7:42)
Released by: Artemis
Release date: 2004
Total running time: 49:35