The year's silliest record by a best-selling act, Eve purports to be a song cycle evoking Woman, yet the portrait thrown up by this 3-D space-rock oratorio is of some whory Victorian witch in a leather headdress flicking her garter belt and hissing curses. "I'd rather be a man than sin my soul like you do," announces David Paton, playing one of the LP's four male accusers. "You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas," spits another. That about sums up Eve's sexual politics. When it's finally Woman's turn to reply — Woman gets only two cuts to Man's four — she's made to whine about being lonely.

On last year's witty I Robot, the Alan Parsons Project's bombastic and synthesized orchestral pop rock proved to be a nifty idiom for exploring man-machine myths. But the more human the theme, the more inappropriate such a style becomes. And how much more human can you get than a concept album concerned with sex? Though Eve offers plenty of sonic grandeur—the forceful melody of "Damned if I Do," the Beach Boys-like vocal harmonies in "Secret Garden" — the lyrics are almost clumsy and sententious enough to give sex a bad name.

Eve will make a good demo record for audio equipment. (RS 306)

STEPHEN HOLDEN