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Alan Parsons: I Robot

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Arista Records
Released: 1977.07.01
Time:
 61:58
Category: Progressive rock, Art Rock
Producer(s): Alan Parsons
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.alanparsons.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2020
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] I Robot (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 6:02
[2] I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 3:22
[3] Some Other Time (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 4:06
[4] Breakdown (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 3:50
[5] Don't Let It Show (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 4:24
[6] The Voice (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 5:24
[7] Nucleus (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 3:31
[8] Day After Day [The Show Must Go On] (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 3:49
[9] Total Eclipse" (A.Powell) - 3:09
[10] Genesis Ch. 1 V. 32 (A.Parsons/E.Woolfson) - 3:28

2007 reissue bonus tracks:

[11] Boules (I Robot experiment) - 1:59
[12] Breakdown (early demo of backing riff) - 2:09
[13] I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You (backing track rough mix) - 3:28
[14] Day After Day (early stage rough mix) - 3:40
[15] The Naked Robot - 10:19

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Alan Parsons - Keyboards, Vocoder, Backing Vocals, Acoustic Guitar, Engineer, Producer
Eric Woolfson - Keyboards, Vocoder, Backing Vocals, Executive Producer

David Paton - Bass, Acoustic Guitar, Backing Vocals
Stuart Tosh - Drums, Percussion, Backing Vocals
Ian Bairnson - Electric & Acoustic Guitars, Backing Vocals
Duncan Mackay - Keyboards
B.J. Cole - Steel Guitar
John Leach - Cimbalom, Kantele

Lenny Zakatek - Vocals on [2]
Allan Clarke - Vocals on [4]
Steve Harley - Vocals on [6]
Jack Harris - Vocals on [8]
Peter Straker - Vocals on [3]
Jaki Whitren - Vocals on [3]
Dave Townsend - Vocals on [5]
The English Chorale - Vocals on [1,9]
The New Philharmonia Chorus - Vocals on [10]
Andrew Powell - Orchestra & Choir Arrangements on [1,9,10], Conductor on [1,9,10]
Bob Howes - Choir Master
David Katz - Orchestra Contractor, Violin

Hilary Western - Backing Vocals
Smokey Parsons - Backing Vocals
Tony Rivers - Backing Vocals on [3]
John Perry - Backing Vocals on [3]
Stuart Calver - Backing Vocals on [3]

Chris Blair - Assistant Engineer, Mastering
George Hardie - Design
Hipgnosis - Cover Design, Photography
Richard Manning - Illustrations
Pat Stapley - Assistant Engineer

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


MC 1977 Arista - AC8-8040
CD 1989 Arista - 259651
CD 1990 Arista - ARCD-8040
LP 1999 Simply Vintage - 209651
DVD-Audio 2001 Classic Collection - 1035
LP 2004 Classic Collection - 8040
CD 2007 RCA - 82876815242
CD 2007 Arista/Arista Legacy/Sony Music Distribution - 82876815242
CD 2008 BMG - 34454
LP 2008 Classic Records - 7002
LP 2009 Classic Records - 7002200
LP 2013 Music on Vinyl - MOVLP 888
CD 2013 Sony Music/Sony Music Distribution - SICP-30168
CD 2013 Legacy/Sony Legacy - 88883718652
CD Super Audio Hybrid 2016 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab - 2174
LP 2016 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab - MFSL 2455
LP 2017 Arista - 88985375411LP

Recorded between December 1976 and March 1977 at the Abbey Road Studio, London.



Expanded Edition Bonus Material

They say a poem is never finished, it is abandoned. The same could certainly be said of music, lyrics or any creative effort. The great advantage of the recording process is that as one keeps rough mixes as a guide, one can delve into stages before the point of abandonment and revisit some of the magic from earlier attempts or stages.

Amongst this collection of bonus material for the 'I Robot' album, there are several examples of the magical early takes and in this re-mastered version of 'I Robot', for those interested in the process, there is a unique opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain of the recording process. Also included are some abandoned experiments as well as demo material which guided the ultimate master recordings.

Here is a track listing of the bonus material to be included on the 'I Robot' expanded edition album to whet your appetite!

Track 11 - I Robot (Boules experiment)
EW "This is an example of an abandoned experiment. While in France, I noticed that Boules was the local French obsession, much like snooker in the UK or pool in the US. I discovered these metal balls made a fascinating noise when you banged them lightly together and I tried to incorporate this into an early studio demo recording of I Robot. Although I thought the effect could have worked quite well, Alan didn't share my enthusiasm and the idea was abandoned."

Track 12 - Breakdown (Early Demo of Backing Riff)
AP "This is an early attempt to find a feel from a chord sequence I had come up with. Eric constructed the final melody and lyrics around it. It is slower than the tempo eventually chosen."

Track 13 - I Wouldn't Want Be Like You (Backing Track Rough Mix)
EW "This is an excellent example of the early stage of the magic 'take' which was eventually developed into the master recording. Interestingly, from the point of view of any aspiring solo guitarists, this rough mix pre-dates the tremendous Ian Bairnson solo which was such a feature of so many of the Project recordings, but this was what Ian developed his solo over and it gives an opportunity for others to see what they might have come up with by playing along with the backing."

Track 14 - Day after Day (early stage rough mix)
AP "This was an example of a 'feel' based track built around a synthesizer figure."

Track 15 - The Naked Robot
EW "I recall that in creating 'Projects' we attempted to let different tracks merge into each other as part of the editing process and this meant that much of the material recorded was in compatible tempos and keys. We were reminded of this while reviewing much of the archive material on this album and had the idea of trying to re-combine some early stage mixes of material that was subsequently developed differently. This ten-minute medley of early stage mixes of instrumental pieces on the album seems to take on a life of its own with a different ambience and feel to the original record. The elements contained within this medley all appeared in a modified form on the eventual master, which could obviously have gone in a very different direction."

Liner Notes



Alan Parsons delivered a detailed blueprint for his Project on their 1975 debut, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, but it was on its 1977 follow-up, I Robot, that the outfit reached its true potential. Borrowing not just its title but concept from Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi Robot trilogy, this album explores many of the philosophies regarding artificial intelligence -- will it overtake man, what does it mean to be man, what responsibilities do mechanical beings have to their creators, and so on and so forth -- with enough knotty intelligence to make it a seminal text of late-'70s geeks, and while it is also true that appreciating I Robot does require a love of either sci-fi or art rock, it is also true that sci-fi art rock never came any better than this. Compare it to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, released just a year after this and demonstrating some clear influence from Parsons: that flirts voraciously with camp, but this, for all of its pomp and circumstance, for all of its overblown arrangements, this is music that's played deadly serious. Even when the vocal choirs pile up at the end of "Breakdown" or when the Project delves into some tight, glossy white funk on "The Voice," complete with punctuations from robotic voices and whining slide guitars, there isn't much sense of fun, but there is a sense of mystery and a sense of drama that can be very absorbing if you're prepared to give yourself over to it. The most fascinating thing about the album is that the music is restless, shifting from mood to mood within the course of a song, but unlike some art pop there is attention paid to hooks -- most notably, of course, on the hit "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You," a tense, paranoid neo-disco rocker that was the APP's breakthrough. It's also the closest thing to a concise pop song here -- other tunes have plenty of hooks, but they change their tempo and feel quickly, which is what makes this an art rock album instead of a pop album. And while that may not snare in listeners who love the hit (they should turn to Eye in the Sky instead, the Project's one true pop album), that sense of melody when married to the artistic restlessness and geeky sensibility makes for a unique, compelling album and the one record that truly captures mind and spirit of the Alan Parsons Project.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



The Alan Parsons Project is an interesting anomaly in pop culture history. The outfit is an anomaly because it was a sort of progressive rock band or art rock band that made concept albums chiefly during the late '70s and early '80s, a time when most dinosaur rock bands of similar ilk were either adapting to new sounds (Rush, Genesis) or were going the way of the dodo (Emerson, Lake & Palmer). What's more, the Alan Parsons Project actually had hits, ranging from "Damned If I Do" to "Games People Play" to "Eye in the Sky" to the divine Phil Spector-influenced "Don't Answer Me". Part of the reason the Alan Parsons Project was so radio friendly was because it really was a wolf in a soft-rock band's clothing along the lines of an Air Supply. As such, the band (if you can call them that as they didn't tour during their heyday and used session musicians) is sort of looked at with some derision today: the Alan Parsons Project was used as a punchline in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and much of their 10 album discography can be obtained by scouring vinyl buck bins in used record stores. (To wit, my vinyl copies of 1983's The Best of the Alan Parsons Project and 1984's Ammonia Avenue set me back 50 cents each.) In the liner notes to this "Legacy Edition" reissue of the 1977 sophomore LP, I Robot, Parsons is incredulous that his group was the only rock band on Arista Records at the time (a claim that isn't exactly true as the Dwight Twilley Band was signed to the label around the same period, and there are probably other examples), and he was rubbing shoulders with the likes of fellow label mates Barry Manilow and Whitney Houston at industry functions. That isn't so amazing when you think about it, for the Alan Parsons Project wasn't, at times, too far removed from the easy going sounds of Manilow or Houston.

It may be an era for an Alan Parsons Project revival, however, with the re-release of I Robot here (and there's also a new Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab limited edition that's out there, which is just another repackaging of the LP since a 2007 remastered disc), and news that early 2014 will bring a box set titled The Alan Parsons Project Complete Album Collection, which will group all of the band's albums together along with an unreleased disc called The Sicilian Defence, which was supposed to be the outfit's fourth album for Arista somewhere around 1979 or 1980. Current day groups such as Muse have arguably been taking cues from Alan Parsons as well, in addition to the fact that I Robot single "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" has recently shown up in the video game Grand Theft Auto V. But there's another reason why one should look back at the Alan Parsons Project: I can't think of another example where a noted engineer and producer became a household name in his or her own right as a recording superstar. However, Alan Parsons already had a lot to his name before meeting up with the late Eric Woolfson (he died in 2009 of kidney cancer) and asking him to manage his career as a producer; Parsons had engineered the Beatles' Abbey Road and Let It Be albums as well as, perhaps more famously, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and was working as a producer for a wide range of acts such as Pilot (who have a great '70s hit in "Magic"), Al Stewart and Ambrosia. Before long, Woolfson, who was the Alan Parsons Project's principle lyricist and songwriter, and Parsons were making music and albums together, at first based on the works of other writers. The group's 1976 debut Tales of Mystery and Imagination was focused on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and, for a follow-up, the duo turned their attention to science-fiction author Isaac Asimov's 1950 book of short stories, I, Robot. Although Asimov was encouraging of the project, the book was already optioned to a film and television company, so Woolfson had to fudge the concept a little by making a set of songs that was more generally about the relationship between man and machine, and, though the group used the title of Asimov's book, they had to drop the comma for copyright reasons. And, thus, I Robot was born. While Tales of Mystery and Imagination had been a modest hit, I Robot would eventually go platinum by 1978, and might have benefited from being released just weeks after the first Star Wars movie opened in theatres, which, of course, whetted the public's imagination for all things involving robots.

The remastering job on this version of I Robot, overseen by Parsons and Woolfson's daughter, Sally, is, in a word, phenomenal. It is crisp and clear, with music that just pops out of your speakers, and there is nary any trace of tape hiss or other signifiers of a record that came out of the late '70s. Forget about bringing that other noted 1977 release (cough, cough, Steely Dan's Aja) with you when you're shopping for a new stereo system: I Robot is just equally as good in terms of a crystalline sound that is virtually flawless. But does the album itself hold up some 36 years later? Well, yes. And no. It has all the hallmarks and indulgences of both progressive rock and Top 40 pop music of the era, and can be quite cornball at times. But that also makes the record rather fun. For instance, if you were to listen to the album's third track, "Some Other Time", you might just think that it's a singular vocalist performing the duties. Wrong. It's actually the marriage of a male vocalist singing the verses and a female vocalist doing the choruses, and you'd never be able to really tell the difference if you weren't listening carefully and knew of the history behind the record's production. That just speaks to the mastery of Parsons as a recording engineer and producer, showcasing something of a perfectionist streak. What's more, the album as a whole is an interesting amalgamation of art rock, disco, jazz and classical influences, and offers a great deal of sonic wonderment, from the opening funky instrumental track "I Robot", which shares some similarities to Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" from Dark Side of the Moon, in that a female soprano vocalist sings over part of the track. "Nucleus", meanwhile, is a picturesque piece of analog keyboards, the ones used here were a precursor to the digital samplers of the '80s, washing chords over each other as though waves were crashing down on a beach. "Total Eclipse" is absolutely frightful, with a choir employed to create a stark effect that feels more lifted out of The Exorcist than science-fiction. And singles "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You", with its pseudo-disco riffs, and the soft, soaring ballad "Don't Let It Show", later covered by Pat Benatar, are effective, even if they are somewhat dated.

What makes I Robot so interesting is that it shows that the Alan Parsons Project didn't have the same limitations as a standard rock band. If Woolfson didn't feel up to singing lead on a particular track, and he didn't until 1980's The Turn of a Friendly Card, the duo could just bring in a guest vocalist...or 10. Instead of employing a stable band of musicians, the group could swap people in and out of the line-up, though most of the members of Pilot are employed as a backing band on this recording. And if a track was lacking a certain je ne sais quoi, a choir could easily and effectively be brought in to provide overdubs. This aspect of the outfit is given full flower on the bonus disc of material, which really acts as an audio documentary of the making of the album by isolating elements of certain tracks. We hear Hilary Western rehearsing her vocals for "I Robot" and expressing doubts over her performance. We hear the choir used (quite laughably, as it sounds like a chorus of dwarves out of Lord of the Rings) on "Breakdown". We hear the complete female vocal of Jaki Whitren on "Some Other Time", and come to understand why Parsons jettisoned her singing on the verses as it's quite weak. And we also hear "The Naked Robot", a 10-and-a-half minute suite of early mixes that stitches together some of the album's instrumentals ("I Robot", "Nucleus" and "Genesis Ch. 1 V. 32") and suggests that the album could have taken an entirely different and more heavily progressive tact. Granted, there isn't really full-fledged material on these demos, which may disappoint some looking for bonus "songs" that were in a state of completion, but this disc is effective as a whole as a "behind the scenes" taster of I Robot that provides a great deal of studio-based insight. There's even the presence of a US radio commercial promoting the record that is humorous in its hyperbole: "It takes a special kind of genius that can make music that you can see! A rock masterpiece in colours you've never heard before!"

Today, I Robot is indeed generally seen as the Alan Parsons Project's masterpiece – it is the album recommended as essential listening by Allmusic.com, for one – and, unlike many other records of the era, it is notable that even though there are campy elements to the music if you're looking back on it with modern glasses, the album as a whole is played dead serious. That fact alone elevates I Robot into the pantheon of great art rock records. While die-hard Parsons fans may want to wait until the aforementioned box set is released, as I Robot will be included on it, for those who are actually curious about the producer and what he brought to the table, this would be an effective starting place. (Though, truth be told, you could probably subsist yourself on various 'best of' compilations that are out there, and there was one just released in May of 2013.) While the Alan Parsons Project might be best known for being the name of Dr. Evil's laser to most of a certain age, I Robot proves that the outfit was no joke, and took a very serious approach, if not to songcraft, than the actual cobbling together of albums that pretty much feel like true long-players, start to finish. There's some great, if hokey, material to be had on I Robot, and yet it is also hugely entertaining and a must have for geeks interested in the late '70s sci-fi landscape. Will there be a renaissance for this kind of music? Highly unlikely. Still, I Robot offers a glimpse inside two musical geniuses' attention to detail, and is a rewarding listen for those running out of Genesis, Jethro Tull and Rush albums to buy.

Zachary Houle - 03 Dec 2013
popmatters.com



I Robot is the second studio album by British rock band The Alan Parsons Project, released on 1 June 1977 by Arista Records. The album draws conceptually on author Isaac Asimov's science fiction Robot trilogy, exploring philosophical themes regarding artificial intelligence. It was re-released on vinyl and cassette tape in 1984 and on CD in 2007.

The album was intended to be based on the I, Robot stories written by Asimov, and Eric Woolfson spoke with Asimov himself, who was enthusiastic about the idea. As the rights already had been granted to a TV/movie company, the album's title was altered slightly by removing the comma in "I,", and the theme and lyrics were made to be more generically about robots rather than to be specific to the Asimov universe. The cover inlay reads: "I Robot... The story of the rise of the machine and the decline of man, which paradoxically coincided with his discovery of the wheel... and a warning that his brief dominance of this planet will probably end, because man tried to create robot in his own image." The title of the final track, "Genesis Ch.1 v.32", follows this theme by implying a continuation to the story of Creation, since the first chapter of Genesis only has 31 verses.

The album cover photo features Storm Thorgerson's assistants in the escalator tubes of the circular Terminal 1 building of the Charles de Gaulle Airport outside of Paris. Over this is superimposed a painting of a robot with a stylised atom for a brain. The robot also appears on the label of the record. The original vinyl release has a gatefold-style cover; the inside spread has the lyrics and a monochrome photograph of Parsons. The pose and angle of the photograph echoes that of the robot on the front cover.

I Robot has been reissued multiple times in various formats since its initial release on vinyl, including numerous audiophile releases. Besides the 8-track, vinyl and compact-cassette releases, Arista also released the original aluminum CD along with the rest of the Project albums, up to that time. Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MFSL) released the album on standard vinyl (MFSL 1-084), UHQR vinyl (MFQR 1-084), and on aluminium CD (MFCD-1-804). Classic Records has released the album in analogue form on 180-gram vinyl, as well as digitally on HDAD (24 bit/192 kHz and 24 bit/96 kHz DVD-Audio). JVC released the album as a K2 edition, with Ammonia Avenue and Eye in the Sky. In 2007, as part of a larger campaign, Sony released a remastered version along with bonus tracks on CD. It was later released in Japan as an SHM-CD, with the same mastering. The album was re-released under Legacy Recordings as a "legacy edition" in 2013 on CD, with an extra disc with unreleased bonus tracks, mastered by Dave Donelly. There was also a vinyl edition with the same mastering launched one month later.

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