| Tales of Mystery and Imagination | ||||
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| Studio album by The Alan Parsons Project | ||||
| Released | May 1976 (US) June 1976 (UK) |
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| Recorded | July 1975 - January 1976 Abbey Road Studios Mama Jo's Kingsway Hall |
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| Genre | Progressive rock, art rock | |||
| Length | 40:46 | |||
| Label | 20th Century Fox Records (US) Charisma (UK) Casablanca (1982 US reissue with alternate artwork) Mercury (1987 CD remix) |
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| Producer | Alan Parsons | |||
| The Alan Parsons Project chronology | ||||
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| Alternative cover | ||||
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LP featuring alternate artwork
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Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the debut album by the progressive rock group The Alan Parsons Project, released in 1976. The album's avant-garde soundscapes kept it from being a blockbuster, but the interesting lyrical and musical themes — retellings of horror stories and poetry by Edgar Allan Poe — attracted a small audience. The title of the album is taken from a popular title for Poe's macabre tales of the same name, Tales of Mystery & Imagination, first published in 1908 and many times since under this name.
Tales of Mystery and Imagination peaked at #38 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart. "(The System Of) Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether" peaked at #37 on the Pop Singles chart.
Contents |
"The Raven" features actor Leonard Whiting on lead vocals, with Alan Parsons performing vocals through an EMI vocoder. According to the album's liner notes, "The Raven" was the first rock song ever to feature a digital vocoder.
The Prelude of "The Fall of the House of Usher", although uncredited, is inspired by the opera fragment "La chute de la maison Usher" by Claude Debussy which was composed in 1908-1917.[1]
On "The Raven", notes from both "I Robot" and "Breakdown" from the I Robot album can be heard. "To One In Paradise" has musical similarities to "Siren Song" on Alan Parsons' 1993 solo debut Try Anything Once.
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | [2] |
| Rolling Stone | (mixed)[3] |
Critical reaction to the album was often mixed; for example, Rolling Stone's Billy Altman concluded that it mostly failed at reproducing Poe's tension and macabre fear, ending by claiming that "devotees of Gothic literature will have to wait for someone with more of the macabre in their blood for a truer musical reading of Poe's often terrifying works".[4]
Simply called The Alan Parsons Project, it was successful enough to achieve gold status. The identity of The Alan Parsons Project as an artist was cemented on the second album, I Robot in 1977.
The original version of the album was available for several years on vinyl and cassette, but was not immediately available on CD. In 1987, Parsons completely remixed the album, including additional guitar passages and narration (by Orson Welles) as well as updating the production style to include heavy reverb and the gated reverb snare drum sound, which was popular in the 1980s. The CD notes that Welles never met Parsons or Eric Woolfson, but sent a tape to them of the performance shortly after the album was manufactured in 1976. In 1994 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MFSL) released the original 1976 version on CD (UDCD-606), making the original available digitally for the first time. In 2007, a Deluxe Edition released by Universal Music included both the 1976 and the 1987 versions remastered by Alan Parsons during 2006 with eight additional bonus tracks.
In July, 2010, the album was named as one of Classic Rock magazine's "50 Albums That Built Prog Rock".[5]
Orson Welles' narration appears on the 1987 Remix only, at the beginning of "A Dream Within a Dream" and "Prelude".
Disc 1: Tracks 1-11, Original Album in Original 1976 Mix
Disc 2: Tracks 1-11, Original Album in 1987 Remix
| Year | Chart | Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1976 | The Billboard 200 | 38 |
| 1976 | UK Albums Chart | 56 |
| 1976 | Canada | 81 |
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