Alan Parsons Project – The Sicilian Defence
Some albums become legendary because they were never released, and then the fan clamoring begins until someone, sensing a good opportunity to pay the mortgage for a month or two, relents, and puts out some kind of unfinished, compromised, or finished-after-the-fact-many-years-later version of whatever it was going to be (but hey, enough about the various versions of Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse or Brian Wilson’s Smile out there). (Sometimes something remains unreleased permanently, unless someone just straight up raids the vaults.) The fact that it couldn’t be heard, the fact that the fans were being denied their prize, becomes the main vector of attraction.
The Sicilian Defence was never actually intended to be released, though. Recorded in 1979 between Alan Parsons and his songwriting collaborator in the Project, Eric Woolfson, it was always a negotiating tactic between the two principals of the Alan Parsons Project and their label at the time, Arista. In short, Parsons and Woolfson wanted to alter their deal, and delivered the all-instrumental Sicilian Defence to Arista almost simultaneously with the released 1979 album Eve to give them leverage: they’d delivered the last two albums of the Project’s contract. They were either done with Arista and free to go elsewhere, or Arista could give them more time and money to work on the next album. The Sicilian Defence was disposable. It was Alan and Eric screwing around on pianos and synthesizers in studio downtime. It was a ploy designed to freak out their handlers at the label, not the Project’s great unfinished symphony.
The inclusion of a piano instrumental track from the unreleased album on the 2008 remastered reissue of Eve seemed to portend a change of heart, even though Parsons was public in his desire for the entire unreleased album to stay that way permanently. (As Sony/Legacy was now controlling the band’s back catalog, the label insisted.) And then in 2014, it was included as a bonus disc in a pricey, career-spanning box set. But now The Sicilian Defence has finally become available on its own in digital form, and it’s not without its charms. As the album is named after an aggressive set of chess moves, the tracks are named after moves in that sequence. The track from which three minutes were excerpted for the “Elsie’s Theme” track on the Eve remaster is “P-Qb4”, and is twice the length of the previously released excerpt. It’s a lovely solo piano piece, and “P-Q4” and “KtxP” follow in a similar vein (the latter with a very chintzy late ’70s drum machine in the background). “Kt-QB3”, another piano piece, has a more aggressive pace and feels like it’s threatening to develop into a proper song, but as it noodles on for over eight minutes, it lands as a piece that wouldn’t been well off calling it a day at the four-and-a-half-minute mark.
But the really interesting stuff is a handful of lo-fi synthesizer jams. “P-K4”, “Kt-KB3”, and “PxP” have a percolating, vintage synth vibe that I can be describe with the following ludicrous phrase: “early ’80s Weather Channel local forecast”. That may seem like the most obscure possible descriptor, and yet I can’t think of a better one. They’re not light-years away from “Hyper-Gamma-Spaces” or “Mammagamma”, but they are at least 273,600 miles from them – they seem more like demos than anything close to a finished product. “…Kt-QB3” and “Kt-B3”, the two shortest tracks, have strings and choral vocals probably recorded as warm-ups or outtakes from previous albums’ sessions and edited together. “P-Q3” is a synth piece with a pastoral, classical feel. Rather than building to anything significant, the album – such as it is – just…ends.
None of it was ever developed further for use on later releases, and in some cases that’s a pity, because there are some promising starts – but only starts.
The part of me that loves new wave and analog synths doing analog synth things loves those tracks on this album, but let’s face it: this album should probably be recused from getting a rating because we were never meant to hear it, and wouldn’t have, except that the studio-owned master recordings changed hands and the new label decided that it would be heard regardless of Parsons’ wishes (Woolfson died in 2009). As a standalone listening experience, The Sicilian Defence really doesn’t work unless you know its backstory, even though the Project was renowned for its instrumental pieces. But if you’re looking for that circa-1983 local forecast vibe? I can give this a hearty recommendation.
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- P-K4 (5:06)
- P-Qb4 (6:22)
- Kt-KB3 (3:07)
- …Kt-QB3 (1:15)
- P-Q4 (3:55)
- PxP (3:28)
- KtxP (4:01)
- Kt-B3 (0:53)
- Kt-QB3 (8:16)
- P-Q3 (3:29)
Released by: Sony/Legacy/Arista
Release date: March 23, 2014
Total running time: 39:50
The Secret may be the best album has turned out since the Project’s heyday, and it really does sit alongside the best of the Project’s output in the quality of both the songwriting and the performance and production of the songs, and the degree to which the songs and the underlying theme of the album have been thought out. At numerous points during this album, I found myself thinking that the late Eric Woolfson (composer and theme architect of the Project’s original string of concept albums) would have wholeheartedly approved of The Secret. It’s worthy of sitting alongside Eye In The Sky and I Robot.
