Record #105: The Alan Parsons Project – Pyramid (1978)

Yesterday, my wife bought this for me after finding it at a resell shop for 25 cents and remembering me mentioning their name. I mention this because my wife is rad, even if the album, APP’s first flop, is decidedly not so rad, especially in the shadows of the towering prog monoliths that made up the better parts of the Project’s discography.

Most of the album just sounds kind of…forgettable. As with every other Alan Parsons Project album, this one starts with an instrumental track, but by the time the drums fade out and the bassline starts the next song, I’ve forgotten what the intro sounded like. The Chicago Bulls won’t be making it their walk-out music anytime soon. The rest of the album has its highs (Hyper-Gamma-Spaces) and lows (Pyramania), but the lows are lower, and the highs aren’t quite high enough to grasp greatness. It fails to achieve the same avant-garde prog of I Robot and the dazzling pop of Eye in the Sky to come. Rather, this record is the work a group who has achieved greatness on accident and doesn’t know where to go from there.