I used to say that Pink Floyd was my favourite band. Now, I realize that at best they’re a tie with The Alan Parsns Project. The Project has the unique property that I actually really like just about everything they ever did. Even Pink Floyd can’t claim that.

So, in my typical style, on the Binary Scale (which goe from 0 to 1, integral), is my review of the Project discography and related albums.

Project Albums

• Tales of Mystery and Imagination
  The Project’s debut album, inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe. This is one of their best.

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

• I Robot
  Described as “A look at the future through the eyes of the present,” this is another one of their best

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: I Robot, Don’t Let It Show, The Voice

• Pyramid
  The complement to I Robot, described as “A look at the past through the eyes of the present,” this is good, but I don’t like it quite as much as the others.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: In The Lap of the Gods, Pyramania

• Eve
  As the title implies, an album about women, and their effect on men. Generally believed to be their weakest album, meaning that instead of being great, it is merely good.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: You Lie Down With Dogs, Damned If I Do

• Turn of a Friendly Card
  An album about risk, reward, and luck. Another one of their best.

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: Games People Play, The Ace of Swords, Nothing Left to Lose

• Eye In The Sky
  Their best selling album, with their biggest hit single as the title track, this album is all great.

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: Eye In The Sky, Silence and I, Psychobabble

• Ammonia Avenue
  An album about the disconnect between scientific development and the public perception thereof, this is sometimes cites as their most ‘radio friendly’ album. I didn’t like this one when I first heard it, but it grew on me after subsequent listenings

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: Prime Time, Dancing on a Highwire, Pipeline, Ammonia Avenue

• Vulture Culture
  An album about consumerism, originally planned to be part of a double album with Ammonia Avenue, but ultimately released separately. Not one of their very best, but still a great album.

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: Days are Numbers, Somebody Out There

• Stereotomy
  An album about the pressures of fame, this is one of my favorites, though not one of their most successful albums.

• Score: 2
  Top Picks: Stereotomy, In The Real World, Where’s The Walrus, Light of the World

• Gaudi
  The Project’s final album before the official ‘breakup’, inspired by architect Antoni Gaudi. Again, a great album but not one of their best.

• Score: 2
  Top Picks: La Sagrada Familia, Too Late, Standing on Higher Ground

Solo Releases

• Eric Woolfson - Freudiana
  A Project album in all but name, featuring almost all members of the original group, this is half Project-style prog-rock, and half musical soundtrack-style tracks — Woolfson subsequently turned the project into an actual stage musical.

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: The Nirvana Principle, I Am A Mirror, Upper Me

• Andrew Powell - Ladyhawke Soundtrack
  Released as an ostensibly solo album by the Project’s orchestra conductor, this is almost an (instrumental) Project album in its own right. Its style is very much like the synth/rock/orchestra Project tracks of the 80s, though it’s mostly made up of very short songs, being the soundtrack to the movie of the same name.

  Score: 1

Alan Parsons Solo Albums

• Try Anything Once
  Parsons’ first ostensibly ‘solo’ album, in realty every bit an ensemble as a Project album. It has no overarching theme to it, but it is one of his best.

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: The Three Of Me, Turn It Up, Mr. Time, Oh Life (There Must Be More)

• On Air
  An album about human flight. This is probably my favorite Parsons solo album. It also marks the beginning of Parsons’ experimentation with Techno-style music with Apollo

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: Too Close to the Sun, Blown by the Wind, Fall Free, Apollo

• The Best Of Live
  A live album with three bonus studio tracks, I only review (and indeed, own) the studio tracks here.

  The thing about an act like Parsons is, even when they’re bad, they’re good. And these tracks… They’re great.

  Score: 2

• The Time Macine
  I think this is Parsons’ weakest solo album, but it’s still good, and has some really great tracks on it. It continues his experimentation with Techno-esque music, though still mostly Projectesque prog-rock tracks.

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: The Time Machine Part I, The Call of the Wild

• A Valid Path
  I heard this album described as (in so many words) “Alan Parsons Goes Techno”, and I knew I had to have it. I went out and bought it new (instead of used like most of what I buy). It’s true. Alan Parsons has gone techno. It’s still Parsons, but it’s Parsons in a whole new genre. And it has all the musical goodness of Alan Parsons. Also features David Gilmour on guitar on Return to Tunguska

  Score: 2
  Top Picks: Return to Tunguska, Chomolungma

Various ‘Best Of’ Albums

How the hell can you have a ‘best of’ album when damn near every album you ever released is already a ‘best of’ album? I won’t bother to review them as it should be obvious what it would say at this point.

Albums

• Metallica - Master of Puppets
  Commonly considered to be their best album, this has some great classics, and some lukewarm tracks.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Master of Puppets, Welcome Home, Orion

• Metallica - S&M
  A live album, recorded with the San Francisco Symphony. While I usually like rock/symphony fusion (witness all the Alan Parsons and ELO in my collection), this one doesn’t really appeal.

  Score: .5

• Pink Floyd - A Saucerful of Secrets
  While I already had this one, I picked it up again as this is a more recent, higher-quality release. Early Floyd, as they were transitioning from their early psychadelic rock sound to progressive rock. Most of it is great, but some of it is merely good.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Let There Be More Light, Remember A Day, Jugband Blues

• Alan Parsons - You’re The Voice
  Actually there is no such album, I compiled these three tracks as a ‘fictitious EP’ from the three bonus tracks off the Best Of Live CD, since those were the only three tracks I bought.

  The thing about an act like Parsons is, even when they’re bad, they’re good. And these tracks… They’re great.

  Score: 2

Single Tracks

• The Alan Parsons Project - The Naked Robot
  A compilation of early edits to the instrumental tracks on I Robot. Very similar to the final releases, but there’s a few differences to be spotted.

  Score: 1

• Alan Parsons - Antarctica
  This is actually “Return to Tunguska” off A Valid Path, minus David Gilmour’s guitar overdubs. It’s a good song on its own, but it’s missing a lot of its power without the guitar.

  Score: 1 (The full version would get a 2)

• Ozzy Ozbourne - Crazy Train
  Classic metal track from Ozzy; there’s not much more to say

  Score: 1

• 3 Doors Down - When I’m Gone
  Another favorite 3 Doors Down track of mine, along with Kryptonite and Loser

  Score: 1

• Theory of a Deadman - Bad Girlfriend
  Fun, upbeat metal song about a risque girlfriend.

  Score: 1

Reactrix went out of business.

You’ve probably never heard of them, but if you ever visited a fancy mall you might have seen their handiwork. They made these neat little interactive projector displays. Basically it was a ceiling-mounted projector that projected an image onto the floor, with an electric eye that would sense when someone/something moved over it, and alter the image accordingly. So you could have a virtual pool of water, or box full of balls that would swish around when somebody walked over it.

These boneheads were using it for advertising.

What a waste of a brilliant idea. Is it any wonder they went out of business? This bunch of suits looked at this technology and thought “An opportunity to make money selling people shit they don’t want!”

I look at it and think, “Next generation video arcade!”

First, you take the whole getup, and expand it to fill an entire room. The bigger the better (within reason), whatever your budget can afford.

Second. add some accessories, like laser tag-like guns, and/or transponders so the system can track who’s who.

Third, write some worthwhile software for it.

Imagine using the setup as a huge, immersive game of Pong. Now imgine adding any number of extra widgets to the ‘board’ that can deflect the ball and/or be ‘hazards’ to the players, like some bastard child of Pong and Pinball. Or, imagine just taking the laser tag guns and shooting the hell out of each other, with an actual ‘beam’ on the display. And if you get ‘hit’, WHOOSH, the projector ramps up a bright flash of light on your position, then fades you to black, so you actually get the visual effect of ‘dying.’

Set up a bunch of displays like this and charge people to play, like a theme park. For bonus points, open-source the whole thing so anyone (with the budget) can replicate it. And if you set aside some time (like overnight hours) for game programmers to hack up their own games for it, so much the better.

If I ever become stupid rich, this is the project I’m going to work on.

To get mildew out of a shower curtain: Throw it in the washing machine, with bleach.

As always, everything is rated on the Binary Scale.

• Synthesizer Greatest, Volume 2
  A compilation of new-age synthesizer music. Very spacey.

  Score: 1
  Top picks: Magnetic Fields

• Gwen Stefani - The Sweet Escape
  Roughly half bubblegum pop and half rapless-hiphop (the subject of another article I might write soon), not entirely dissimilar to her previous album.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: The Sweet Escape, Early Winter, 4 in the Morning, U Started It, Wonderful Life

• Experience Hendrix - The Best of Jimi Hendrix
  My dad will surely disown me for this, but this album merely taught me that I don’t really like much of Hendrix’s music.

  Score: .5
  Top Picks: Fire, All Along the Watchtower, Foxy Lady

• Oystein Sevag - Global House
  Acoustic (mainly), mellow, worldly new-age music. My mom gave me this album some years ago, but I stupidly gave it back because I didn’t like it. Turns out I was a bit too quick to judge.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Global House

• Dire Straits - Money For Nothing
  This is one of Dire Straits’ best-of albums. I bought it thinking it was Brothers in Arms. There’s only one track on it that I really like that’s not on Brothers in Arms.

  Score: .5
  Top Picks: Sultans of Swing, Walk of Life, Money for Nothing, Brothers in Arms

• Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
  A week later, after realizing my mistake, I bought this album. Turns out the only songs I really like are already on Money for Nothing, though at least buying this album got me the full versions. (The ones on Money for Nothing are edited)

  Score: .5
  Top Picks: Money for Nothing, Walk of Life, The Man’s Too Strong, Brothers in Arms

• Pink Floyd - Is There Anybody Out There?
  The live recordings of The Wall from the original 1980-81 tour. It’s remarkably similar to the studio version, though the live shows had some extra material that were cut from the studio album for time.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, Mother, One Of My Turns, Comfortably Numb, Run Like Hell

• Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers Greatest Hits
  It’s Tom Petty. How far wrong can you go?

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: I Need To Know, Refugee, Runnin’ Down A Dream, Free Fallin’, Mary Jane’s Last Dance

• The Police - Every Breath You Take: The Classics
  Anyone following this blog may have noticed by now that I buy a lot of “best of” albums. I do this when there’s an artist that I’m interested in, but not sure of any particular album I want to get. In this case I bought it based on some of their songs that I’d heard before that I liked, and discovered a few more that I liked.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Can’t Stand Losing You, Message in a Bottle, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic

• The Beatles - Past Masters
  The definitive collection of all the singles, EPs, and other tracks that didn’t see release on any of the ‘official’ albums.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Hey Jude, Let It Be

• The Beatles - Help!
  Probably my second favorite Beatles album (after Abbey Road), this is the album where they start to emerge from their ‘sappy love songs’ phase that dominated their earlier releases. I’ve liked this album since I first saw the movie in my teens, and subsequently raided my dad’s old reel-to-reel tapes (and machine) for more Beatles (and other) material.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Help!, The Night Before, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Ticket to Ride, Yesterday

• Beatles For Sale
  More of their aforementioned ‘sappy love songs’ phase.

  Score: 0

• The Beatles — Let It Be
  The last Beatles record released (though the second-to-last recorded), this is the version originally produced by Phil Spector from the raw studio tapes (as opposed to the ‘Naked’ version released years later, remastered without Spector’s embellishments)

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Let It Be, Get Back

• Beastie Boys - Hello Nasty
  Mostly hip-hop (from a trio of white boys no less), with some experimental, even downright jazzy tracks.

  Score: 1
  Top Picks: Body Movin’, Intergalactic

A.K.A. “The complete list of CDs you have to buy to get all the material the Beatles ever released”

Having bought “Past Masters” volumes I and II today, I was reminded of the confusion regarding the official, complete Beatles discography. Between the myriad non-album singles, EPs, and differing album versions, it’s difficult to tell what exactly makes up the ‘canonical’ list of ‘official’ Beatles releases.

Here, as best I can figure from Wikipedia, it is:

• Please Please Me
  The Beatles’ first album, as released in the UK. Roughly equivalent to “Introducing… The Beatles” in the US.
• With The Beatles
  The second UK release. The tracks in this album were spread over the (despite the title) second and third US releases, “Meet The Beatles” and “The Beatles’ Second Album”, along with several non-album singles.
• A Hard Day’s Night
  The third UK release. One album side contains the film soundtrack, the other side contains songs not featured in the film. The US release had the film soundtrack side, plus several instrumental renditions used in the film.
• Beatles For Sale
  The fourth UK release. Songs from this album could also be found on the US releases Beatles ‘65 and Beatles VI
• Help!
  The fifth UK release. Like “A Hard Day’s Night,” the first side was the film soundtrack, the second side the non-film portion. Also like “A Hard Day’s Night,” the US release featured the film soundtrack side plus instrumental tracks heard in the film.
• Rubber Soul
  The sixth UK release. Roughly equivalent to the US release, but the US release omits some tracks, later published on the US-only “Yesterday… and Today”
• Revolver
  The seventh UK release. Again, the US omits some tracks, which are also on “Yesterday… and Today”
• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
  The eighth UK release. From this album on, the US versions had the same tracklisting as the UK versions.
• The Beatles
  The ninth UK release, commonly referred to as “The White Album” for its nondescript white cover
• Magical Mystery Tour
  The US release is the ‘official’ version of this album for a change. The UK version was actually a double EP; the US version is a full album, with the EP tracks from the UK plus several non-album singles.
• Yellow Submarine
  The soundtrack for the film, the A-side contains six Beatles recordings (two of which were released previously), the B-side containing George Martin’s instrumental score for the film.
• Abbey Road
  The eleventh UK album, and second-to-last released, though the last recorded.
• Let It Be
  The twelfth and final UK album, though actually recorded during the aborted recording session preceding Abbey Road. John Lennon gave the raw studio tapes to Phil Spector, who mixed a full album out of it. Years later it was remixed into a new version, sans Spector overdubs, as “Let It Be… Naked”
• Past Masters
  Two volumes comprising all singles, B-sides, and other material not released on any of the ‘official’ releases listed above.

Note that this only includes the ‘original’ album and single releases during the band’s tenure, and not the Anthologies, compilations, and other material released years after the breakup.

• The Beatles - Past Masters Volume I
• The Beatles - Past Masters Volume II
• Beatles For Sale
• The Police - Every Breath You Take - The Classics
• Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Greatest Hits

via Rasputin

Irwin Handi-Clamps

These pincer-shaped clamps are designed to open and close easily. They ratchet shut, and only open when you pull the release lever. I got them for holding wood down on the sawhorses when I’m using the saw, but unfortunately they don’t grip tight enough for that — they can only grip as tight as you can squeeze. They’re still useful for holding guides down on the board though.

Score: .5. Useful, but not for heavy-duty tasks

Irwin One-Handed Mini Bar Clamp

Like the Handi-Clamp, these are designed to open and close easily. However, unlike the Handi-Clamp, these things are much more substantial. This model has a pump-action grip, so even when the jaws are already clamped to the object, you can still tighten it more by squeezing the trigger. These will hold a board to a sawhorse. These have a release trigger as well. They have a ratchet-like action (though it dosn’t appear to be an actual mechanical ratchet) so you can push them closed onto an object with your hands (and then pump the trigger to make it tight), but you can’t pull them apart without pulling the release.

Score: 1. Very handy and works well.

As always, everything is rated on the Binary Scale.

• Roger Waters - The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking
  Very similar in style to late-pre-breakup Pink Floyd, such as The Wall or The Final Cut. Actually, it’s what late-pre-breakup Pink Floyd would sound like if you replaced David Gilmour with Eric Clapton (who plays guitar on this album)

  Rating: 1
  Choice tracks: “Sexual Revolution”

• Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals
  Often billed as “industrial”, Manson just sounds like metal to me. Not constant, cover-to-cover goodness, but enough good songs to make it a worthwhile purchase

  Rating: 1
  Choice tracks: “Great Big White World”, “The Dope Show”, “Mechanical Animals”, “I Don’t Like The Drugs”, “The Last Day On Earth”

• The Who - Who’s Next
  It’s The Who. How far wrong can you go?

  Rating: 1
  Choice Tracks: “Baba O’Riley”, “Bargain”, “Behind Blue Eyes”, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

• System of a Down - Toxicity
  More metal. I like it, but not as much as the other two SoaD albums (Mesmerize, Hypnotize) that I have.

  Rating: 1
  Choice Tracks: “Prison Song”, “Chop Suey!”

• No Doubt - Return of Saturn
  I’ve decided that I don’t really like No Doubt very much. There’s only a few songs, across several albums, that I even remotely like. There’s only one on this album, “Ex-girlfriend”, but I do really like it.

  Rating: 0
  Choice Tracks: “Ex-girlfriend”

• Cyndi Lauper - True Colors
  I’ve had this on tape since I was a kid, but I’ve long since lost the tape and have been looking for it on CD ever since. It finally showed up at Rasputin’s this week. I liked it then, and I still like it now.

  Rating: 1
  Choice Tracks: “Change of Heart”, “Calm Inside the Storm”, “One Track Mind”

• The Best of Santana
  The Latin-rock classics you’re all familiar with, plus some more 80s-rock style tracks.

  Rating: 1
  Choice Tracks: “Evil Ways”, “Black Magic Woman”, “Oye Como Va”

• Fleetwood Mac - Greatest Hits
  More classics, with their distinctive (yet not quite definable) style

  Rating: 1
  Choice Tracks: “Go Your Own Way”, “Little Lies”

• More Abba Gold
  I’ve discovered that I don’t really like Abba either. Between the first “Gold” compilation and this one, there’s only a handful of songs I like.

  Rating: 0
  Choice Tracks: “Eagle”, “Angeleyes”

• The Who Sell Out
  I recant what I said above. There’s only a couple tracks on this one that I really like. Rael, one of the bonus tracks on the remastered CD, features a passage that would eventually evolve into one of the recurring themes in “Tommy.”

  Rating: 0 (Much as it pains me)
  Choice Tracks: “I Can See for Miles”, “Rael 1”

• Kitaro - The Light of the Spirit
  Moody new-age music, a combination of synth, orchestra, and even a tinge of rock.

  Rating: 1
  Choice Tracks: “Sundance”, “Howling Thunder”