Eye in the Sky is the first of three albums the Project recorded on analogue equipment and mixed directly to the digital master tape.[6]
Release
Eye in the Sky was the last platinum record in the United States from the band.[7]
Eye in the Sky contains the title track, the Alan Parsons Project's biggest hit,[8] with lead vocals by Eric Woolfson. The album itself was a major success, reaching the top 10 (and sometimes the number one slot) in numerous countries.[9]
The album features the instrumental piece "Sirius", which has become a staple of many college and professional sporting arenas throughout North America. It is best known for its use by the Chicago Bulls to introduce its starting line-up during its championship years of the 1990s and is still used today.[10]
Another instrumental, "Mammagamma", was used separately by TVNZ in New Zealand and BBC Wales in the mid-1980s for their snooker coverage,[11][12] and as a bed for the "My Favourite Five" feature on Tony Fenton's late-night 2FM show in Ireland across 1989 and 1990. The instrumental also saw use in an industrial video for Iveco in Italy.[13]
From contemporary reviews, Ken Tucker of The Philadelphia Inquirer gave the album a one star rating out of five rating, calling it a "hopelessly banal album" with "Paul McCartney-as-manic-depressive melodies and whining vocals would be merely pathetic were it not for Parsons' lyric pretensions".[15]
From retrospective reviews, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic stated that "this is a soft rock album through and through, one that's about melodic hooks and texture," noting that "with the exception of those instrumentals and the galloping suite "Silence and I," all the artiness was part of the idea of this album was pushed into the lyrics, so the album plays as soft pop album—and a very, very good one at that [...] it adds up to arguably the most consistent Alan Parsons Project album—perhaps not in terms of concept, but in terms of music they never were as satisfying as they were here."[2]
* Sales figures based on certification alone. ^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. ‡ Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.
^"Classifiche". Musica e Dischi (in Italian). Retrieved 28 May 2022. Set "Tipo" on "Album". Then, in the "Artista" field, search "Alan Parsons Project".
