British record label Cooking Vinyl is releasing a new version of THE ALAN PARSONS PROJECT 1978’s third album “Pyramid”. There was a 4CD+blu-ray+2LP box set released past August, expensive, bloated with too many early / rough takes, etc… and if you only need the CD why to get the LP’s in the same package or vice versa?
Now are being available the standalone versions, and this digipak CD, with 4 bonus tracks is more than enough.
The release is being sold as “Pyramid (2024 Remaster, Expanded Edition)”, which in fact should be “Pyramid 2024 Stereo Remix, Expanded Edition“. The disc features a new 2024 HD Stereo Remix of the original album done by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios.
Well, Alan Parsons himself has questioned why “Pyramid” needed a re-mixing. This is something many labels are doing nowadays to give classic albums a new life. A risky move, yet valid anyway. You like it or not.
In the case of “Pyramid 2024 Stereo Remix, Expanded Edition” we like the results. It preserves the tone of the original recording, however everything sounds ‘really stereo’, bigger in the spatial spectrum.
We love “Pyramid”, a classy rock&pop album with light proggy feel, and if you are an Alan Parsons / classic rock fan you need to hear this 2024 Stereo Remix.
”Pyramid”, released in May 1978, is The Alan Parsons Project’s third album in three years. Its predecessors, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination (1976) and I Robot (1977) had explored rich lyrical themes, the first reaching into the past to enter the world of the writer Edgar Allan Poe, the second considering a future coloured by the science fiction of Isaac Asimov.
When writing the songs for Pyramid, the Project’s co-founder Eric Woolfson explored a still wider timescale, referring to the Old Kingdom of Egypt of 3000BC as well as the curious – in both senses-thinkers of the modern day who were obsessed with those far-off times.
In the Seventies, New Age thinking centred for some years on the supposed magic of pyramids, which were supposedly useful in many ways-whether that meant purifying water, polishing jewellery, growing plants, preserving food, aiding relaxation, speeding healing, or even enhancing sexual intercourse. No wonder Woolfson found pyramid power such a rich and amusing inspiration for his songwriting.
Woolfson’s partner Alan Parsons recalls: “At the time, you could go to the shops and buy a metal, pyramid-shaped frame that you could put over a milk bottle- and supposedly it would preserve the milk for weeks instead of days. It was kind of trendy in this period, around 1977 to ’78, along with the Pet Rock.”
Woolfson also had a personal interest in pyramids, his attention having been caught by the ancient Egyptian relics that he’d seen on display in Scotland, where he was born in 1945. This concept was perfect for the new album, set for release in May 1978, with the plan to record the music with the same core line-up as Tales… and I Robot plus guest singers.
The results of the sessions at Abbey Road Studios were both subtle and powerful, covering a range of texture and emotion thanks to the state-of-the-art skills of guitarist lan Bairnson, bassist David Paton, drummer Stuart Elliott and the engineering and production genius of Alan Parsons himself.
Parsons remembers: “At the start of ‘Voyager’, there’s a motif that had been going on in my head for some time. John Leach played it on a kantele, which is a Finnish stringed instrument, and we tried it in lots of different keys before we decided which one to use. The part that follows came together in the studio. I think lan Bairnson came up with those wonderful chords. Sadly, we lost lan in 2023: his guitar parts were crucial to the sound of The Alan Parsons Project.”
The first of Pyramid’s guest singers is Colin Blunstone, whose performance on ‘The Eagle Will Rise Again’ is accompanied by cinematic strings and arpeggiated synth chords. There’s a certain expansive luxury and a sheen of lustrousness that makes the song totally convincing, and Blunstone himself recalls: “The session was in Studio 2 at Abbey Road, where I got the feeling that I was working with a very successful, well-rehearsed team who in the best possible way knew what they wanted and how to get it. There was a very friendly and supportive environment, and everything was done to make us feel completely at ease.”
Stepping into different musical territory, ‘One More River’ is an energetic workout, propelled by shuffle bass and Lenny Zakatek’s fantastic, extravagant vocal. The singer tells us: “On ‘One More River’ I started singing in a clean, soul style and then I let rip with a rockier style, which was improvised – because with the APP songs, I usually heard them for the first time on the day I recorded them. On this song, I was always going to go up the range on the third verse, because they’ve heard the first verse, they’ve heard the second verse – so what are you going to do now? I always used the third verse to go for it. When you hear the old soul singers – Solomon Burke, Etta James, Marvin Gaye and all those legends – they get to that third verse, and they take off and the ad-libs come.”
Dean Ford supplies the vocals on ‘Can’t Take It With You’, a simultaneously thoughtful and upbeat song anchored by deep bass notes. It’s propelled by tasteful guitar, synth whistles, and prominent drums, but even this abundant instrumentation pales in comparison to ‘In The Lap Of The Gods’, which features a church bell, pan flute, Eastern atmospheres and epic strings. As before, the music simplifies at one point to bass alone, before piano, choir and orchestra return for a final peak and a sudden end. It’s dramatic stuff.
After this fully-leaded composition, Woolfson and Parsons were evidently aware that subtler vibes were needed, and so the cleverly-titled ‘Pyramania’ is both more humorous and different in tone. With its nifty piano and ersatz tuba break, plus la-la’d vocals from Jack Harris, the song has an almost New Wave feel along the lines of The Buggles, making for quite the stylistic departure from the songs that had gone before.
Parsons then lets loose in grand style with ‘Hyper-Gamma-Spaces’, its title inspired by Woolfson’s brother Richard, a mathematician who had recently gained his D-Phil at Oxford, and whose research gave the track its name. This ia fantastic tune for lovers of synths, and one of APP’s most famous instrumentals.
Finally, ‘Shadow Of A Lonely Man’ serves as a proper, old-fashioned slab of romantic music, filmic in scope and emotional in feel. Inspired by the death of Woolfson’s father-in-law Arthur Zuckerman during the recording of Pyramid, the song benefits hugely from John Miles’ high-register vocal, swathes of strings and a long, slow ending that brings the original album to a suitable close.
We find four bonus tracks here, each of which provides an insight into the working methods of Parsons and Woolfson. The first of these is the fascinating Early Mix of ‘Voyager’, which focuses in subtly different ways on various elements of this beautifully unhurried composition. Check out the Early Rough Mix of ‘What Goes Up’, too, a stripped-down version that allows the instrumentation to breathe, in particular the flurries of plangent guitar chords.
Then take a close listen to ‘The Eagle Will Rise Again (Rough Mix Featuring Backing Vocals)’: it reveals incredible melodic depth in the choral vocals of its title. Finally, invest some time in the beautiful Eric Woolfson Demo Vocal version of ‘Shadow Of A Lonely Man’, simply because it’s an alternate way into this heartfelt, almost symphonic song.
The LP sold two million copies worldwide and was nominated for the 1978 Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Parsons and Woolfson went on to record nine more albums together: Eve (1979), The Turn Of A Friendly Card (1980), their commercial high-point Eye In The Sky (1982), Ammonia Avenue (1984), Vulture Culture (1985), Stereotomy (also ’85) and Gaudi (1987).
A troubled final collaboration, Freudiana, was released under Woolfson’s name in 1990 and was staged in Vienna, Austria as a musical, and another LP called The Sicilian Defence was recorded in 1979 but not officially released until 2014.
So what happened to ‘pyramid power’? Public interest in this area of occult thought quickly waned, and by the Eighties, crystals and transcendental meditation were the new topics of conversation at New Age dinner parties.
With the ”Pyramid” album, Woolfson and Parsons drew a fine line between mocking these shallow obsessions and admiring the indestructible pyramids themselves – while setting that balance against equally immortal music.
Highly Recommended
Tracklist:
Disc 1 (52:46)
1. Voyager (2:14)
2. What Goes Up... (3:40)
3. The Eagle Will Rise Again (4:22)
4. One More River (4:16)
5. Can't Take It With You (5:08)
6. In The Lap Of The Gods (5:28)
7. Pyramania (2:44)
8. Hyper-Gamma-Spaces (4:18)
9. Shadow Of A Lonely Man (5:36)
10. Voyager (Early Mix) (4:30)
11. What Goes Up (Early Rough Mix) (3:38)
12. The Eagle Will Rise Again (Rough Mix Featuring Backing Vocals) (2:18)
13. Shadow Of A Lonely Man (Eric Woolfson Demo Vocal) (4:29)
Featuring a 2024 remaster of the original album by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios.
Includes 4 additional bonus tracks.
The Alan Parsons Project – Pyramid (2024) [CD Remastered Expanded], MP3+FLAC CD
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