You might wonder what work of Poe’s, exactly, you hear Welles reading from, since none of it sounds like the writer’s best-known passages. All Music Guide’s Mike DeGagne more recently called the album “an extremely mesmerizing aural journey” and “a vivid picture of one of the most alluring literary figures in history.” “How important the Poe concept is is questionable,” declared the contemporary Billboard review, “but the LP as a whole holds up well as a viable musical work.” It having been 1976, the writer does note its “strong FM potential,” but time has much increased Tales of Mystery and Imagination‘s status in rock, progressive or otherwise. Not only do Parsons’ compositions use Poe’s themes, they use Poe’s words. If someone asks whether you like Tales of Mystery and Imagination, you’d better clarify which Tales of Mystery and Imagination they mean: the first complete collection of horror and suspense stories by master of psychological unease Edgar Allan Poe, or the first album by progressive rock band The Alan Parsons Project? But if you like one, you might well like the other, given that Parsons based his group’s debut, which contains such tracks as “The Raven,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” directly on Poe’s work.
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