Rating: NN
It’s difficult to imagine that Alan Parsons’s doting fans will get much out of this silicon-era foray. Far from the influences that initially sparked him (he worked on Abbey Road and Dark Side Of The Moon as an engineer), this effort even seems remote from his own progged-out efforts with the Alan Parsons Project. Valid Path brings a tossed salad of contributors to the mix (Crystal Method, David Gilmour, Schpongle, Nortec Collective and Uberzone) to catapult his sonic imaginings into the next generation, with sadly disappointing results. The polyrhythms are leaden and the distortive swells irritatingly sluggish. Plus John Cleese’s 15-second aside on the last track isn’t nearly amusing enough to warrant its credit on the CD jacket. Plugging it just makes the album seem cheap.
