The Project’s Fourth Album
The two primary members of the Alan Parsons Project, Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson, worked with a slew of session musicians and vocalists over the years to craft a “cultivated respect via a small-but-loyal cult audience: sci-fi geeks, audiophiles, musicians into ‘the craft,’ and basically anyone with a decent pair of headphones or an expensive stereo system.” SS
On their fourth album, 1979’s Eve, they matched the top-30, gold-selling status of previous album, 1978’s Pyramid. This album, however, spawned the group’s biggest hit to date – “Damned if I Do” – which reached #27 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The Polarizing Album
Perhaps no album polarizes the Alan Parsons Project fan more than this one. “One camp believes that it’s the worst thing that Parsons ever put together…Another camp believes it’s a misunderstood masterpiece. Fascinatingly enough, this may be one of those rare situations where both are half-true.” DV
On one hand, you can find comments like “Eve…involves some of this group’s most intricate songs” AM that “are highly entertaining with catchy rhythms and intelligent lyrics. Musically, the tempo appealingly switches back and forth from slow to quick, as does the temperament of the album.” AM
On the other hand, you’ll find comments like “Eve offers plenty of sonic grandeur [but] the lyrics are almost clumsy and sententious enough to give sex a bad name.” RS Even more brutal is the claim that “Eve is perhaps the worst engineered Project CD, for starters, its sound muddy and shallow in places…The drums lack punch in most cases, a sad undermixing of talented drummer Stuart Elliot, and David Paton’s bass work is little more than average.” DV
The Concept
There is an equally polarized view of the merits of the concept. One description calls this one of the Project’s “finest marriages of both concept and music.” AM It says the theme “deals with the female’s overpowering effect on man. Each song touches on her ability to dissect the male ego, especially through sexual means, originating with Eve’s tempting Adam in the beginning of time. Not only does this idea gain strength as the album progresses, but a musical battle of the sexes begins to arise through each song.” AM
Look around, though, and you’ll find a very different opinion: “Eve purports to be a song cycle evoking Woman, yet the portrait thrown up by this 3-D space-rock oratorio is of some whory Victorian witch in a leather headdress flicking her garter belt and hissing curses. ‘I’d rather be a man than sin my soul like you do,’ announces David Paton, playing one of the LP’s four male accusers. ‘You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,’ spits another. That about sums up Eve’s sexual politics. When it’s finally Woman’s turn to reply — Woman gets only two cuts to Man’s four — she’s made to whine about being lonely.” RS
"On…I Robot, the Alan Parsons Project’s bombastic and synthesized orchestral pop rock proved to be a nifty idiom for exploring man-machine myths. But the more human the theme, the more inappropriate such a style becomes. And how much more human can you get than a concept album concerned with sex?” RS
With such differing opinions, it is hard to draw a conclusion. Personally, I consider this one the Project’s weaker efforts musically, lyrically, and conceptually that started with an idea that could have been one of their best works. With the Project’s affinity for using a number of vocalists, this could have been a much more interesting (and balanced) study of relationships between man and woman with an attempt to see both points of view. Having said that, the individual songs are not completely without merit, even if the overall theme slips into a woman-bashing fest.
Conclusion
In the end, one must accept that “Eve…is neither as great as some claim, or as bad as some others insist. Alan Parsons, with or without Eric Woolfson, is one of the most underrated and original voices in progressive rock history, but even he has some misses. Eve has to be counted as one, recommended for only the completist and the fan.” DV
Reissue
A 2008 reissue added demos and rough mixes of six of the song from the album along with an edited version of “Elsie’s Theme” from The Sicilian Defence, an album recorded by the Project in 1979 but not released until 2014.
The Songs
Here’s a breakdown of each of the individual songs.
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