...is how you confine listening to prog to only a certain time of the year. The best way to describe this album and its successor "A Christmas Attic" is "what if". What if signature prog-lite band the Alan Parsons Project did a Christmas album, after listening to all four Mannheim Steamroller holiday collections? The music here has the dynamic aspect the Steamers have over Al's Bunch, yet it follows the Parsons formula of mostly vocal songs--only a handful of songs here are instrumentals. Both this album and "Attic" follow another Parsons formula--that of the concept album. Put any two tracks from it on a compilation album and they would have the sampler effect--the listener ends up wondering where the rest of the story is. This material was written to be presented as a whole. But except for "Gaudi"--the story of the architect who designed the La Sagrata Familia cathedral in Madrid--Parsons material as a whole doesn't approach the symphonic level TSO does. Fortunately, TSO's latest is about Beethoven--you don't have to stash that one in your Christmas stuff in the basement. Maybe it's shapes of things to come--"a TSO for all seasons".