Ready, Aye, Ready

Link: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0000C9V7R/701-1857698-2505115

Oh, it's bad. I knew it was going to be weak, and then it managed to be even worse than that. This frisbee is a rendition of the instrumental works of the Alan Parsons Project performed on what sound like some remarkably cheap synths by an anonymous German. I'm not even convinced there's a second person involved as perhaps they might have had an opportunity to destroy the recording before it was committed to a harddrive, never mind a 5" silvery plastic disc.

To give you an idea of the travesty, think of the lushly orchestrated instrumental sections of Andrew Powell and then replace them with the output of one of the cheaper Casio keyboards; how about the saxophone solo in "Hawkeye" replaced by a sine wave? It's that poor and actually reaches lower. It's the audio equivalent of "Space Truckers". If perhaps it contained an interesting rearrangement of the tunes, then perhaps this CD would have reason to exist. It doesn't; this is MIDI's greatest hits all over again, and this time they didn't bother with upgrading to the Soundblaster 16.

Why did I buy it? Well, there's that silly Amazon thing. They listed it as a tribute album by "various artists" and then gave no other information by it. There've been some really good tribute albums in the past and I thought this might have been one of them. Mea culpa, and Amazon doesn't give refunds for total stinkers.