| Year | Album | Rating |
| 1967 | The Piper at the Gates of Dawn TODO | A- |
| 1968 | A Saucerful of Secrets TODO | B+ |
| 1969 | More | C+ |
| 1969 | Ummagumma | B |
| 1970 | Atom Heart Mother | B+ |
| 1971 | Relics | B |
| 1971 | Meddle | A+ |
| 1971 | Live at Pompeii | A- |
| 1972 | Obscured By Clouds | A- |
| 1973 | Dark Side of the Moon | A+ |
| 1975 | Wish You Were Here | A+ |
| 1977 | Animals TODO | A+ |
| 1979 | The Wall TODO | A- |
| 1981 | Is There Anybody Out There? TODO | A- |
| 1985 | The Final Cut | A- |
| 1987 | A Momentary Lapse of Reason | C- |
| 1988 | Delicate Sound of Thunder TODO | C- |
| 1994 | The Division Bell TODO | C+ |
| 1995 | Pulse TODO | B- |
| Miscellaneous TODO |
Pink Floyd was my first rock band and for that I am forever grateful. When I was a 17 year-old die-hard classical music fan, I downloaded Dark Side of the Moon as my first step towards becoming acquainted with this "rock music". I freely confess that I am a massive fan to the point of near-fanaticism. This is hardly an unusual sentiment (though I do have way too many bootlegs), and it's worth a quick glance backwards at why this band has such a hold over me. I can tell you right now that part of it is because of THE SOUND. You know, the way that Pink Floyd can take an average midtempo song which isn't anything particularly special by itself and turn it into profoundly reflective journey merely by using expensive recording studios with talented engineers and... something else. Every Pink Floyd fan knows this weird feeling, the one where you listen to a song like Us and Them and it is this dreamy and tranquil EXPERIENCE and then you listen to some other band and you find yourself wondering why other bands couldn't find some way of capturing the same kind of magic coming from not only good songwriting but also understanding of the psychology behind sounds. The band has sold an infamous number of albums based on their love of absolutely crystal-clear sound that makes you feel like you're in underwater and in outer space at the same time. It's this weird combination of clarity and druggy haze that makes them so popular among stoners, because when you're listening to one of their albums, your head is filled with all kinds of things that don't make rational sense but are absolutely riveting. The sense of flow you get when listening to their albums is unparalleled; I don't think anyone ever put together "albums" the way they did. One way you can tell their enduring quality is because their catalog has been essentially untouched, unlike most other rock groups. You won't find any bonus tracks of studio goofs or outtakes on their albums because of how-well crafted they are, since you would utterly ruin the sense of "completion" by tacking on demos. While this make finding rarities a pain, it helps keep the albums sounding "pure" and filled with all that mystical goodness that is so welcome to sit back and groove to.
Which is all bullshit, of course. Any album sounds great when you're on drugs and fascinated by production tricks. But just because it's easy to mistake something big and slow for weighty and profound doesn't mean that there might not be something in Pink Floyd's music that makes them great. My personal feeling is that Pink Floyd found a great mix of precise yet abstract sonic landscaping and avante-garde yet tuneful songwriting. Most of Pink Floyd's early great works have this really weird sound to them, like they're not normal in some important way. You feel these bizarre emotions, like the songs mean SOMETHING, but not anything you're familiar with. They have plenty of songs that sound more like organic constructs than pieces of sheet music being performed, in the sense that you don't feel a band wrote them but that they just ARE, floating around in the ether and giving off unearthly emanations of hidden menace and subconscious strangeness. I don't know how else to phrase it: who else writes a song like A Saucerful of Secrets that so artfully bridges dissonant noise and hushed bliss? The "construct" vibe comes from the fact that most of the band were architecture students, and so would from time to time write their songs in building blocks to achieve certain effects in a methodical, calculated way. The strangeness comes from it being the 60s, man, and the heavy amount of drugs in the air (and brain) of founder Syd Barrett prompted them to apply their slow, methodical songcraft to the freaky kinetics of psychedelia. This was a potent combination, and you will find very few songs as carefully ordered but as far-out as something like Interstellar Overdrive or A Saucerful of Secrets. They are unique for progressive rock, being not overly classically influenced or dependent on virtuosity. David Gilmour is pretty good, but Rick Wright is only occasionally more than mediocre. I won't even go into the "skills" of Nick Mason or Roger Waters. Their real talent was avoiding a lot of the silliness of other bands like Yes or Genesis while keeping a keen understanding of how to merge art and the very strange.
Later Pink Floyd isn't like that, of course. Early Pink Floyd was a club band who made music for people to take drugs and dance to and so they had a lot of great droning monsters which took you strange places while the band thumped and pounded and played their instruments with cigarette lighters and ball-bearings instead of picks. Middle Pink Floyd was a vehicle for bassist Roger Waters to spread his uniquely cynical (but always poetic) denunciations of just about everything as the other members of the band were either fired or just stopped trying to write music behind his oddly-tempoed harangues. Later Pink Floyd was little more than nostalgic rehashes backed up by massive tours where 20 people on stage would try to hide the fact that they should have just turned on the radio and walked off the stage. For some reason though, the band works! Roger might not be the world's best lyricist since he spends most of his time trying to think of an animal that rhymes with "Margaret Thatcher", but he's just fine at reaching to people about subjects like war, society, politics, and the worries of life, in a non-high-minded way that never seems insincere. On the contrary, he has a genuine anger over losing his father in World War 2 and some of those songs are really touching. It's at least a nice change, since most of their early lyrics were either ridiculous children's fairytales or oblique nonsense. When he started writing, he gave the band the philosophical grounding they needed to become truly relevant. It's just a shame he could only do that at the expense of the rest of the band: firing Rick Wright, sidelining David, and... well, I guess it's not possible to marginalize Nick Mason any more than he marginalized himself. Funny that he's been the only member of the band who's made it all the way through Syd's firing, David's hiring, Rick's firing, Roger's quitting, and then David's ill-advised resuscitation and Rick's re-hiring. You'll never lose betting on Nick Mason!
Of course, I'll be the first to admit their faults. There is a very fine line between "hypnotic" and "boring", which you might feel they cross once too often. The early band had about as much emotional resonance as any average avant-garde artists, even though they had some great music. The last phase of the band had even less, being entirely driven by profits and exploitation of the past. It's the middle period (which I consider to be just before Meddle through The Final Cut) for which they're most famous, because that's where they managed to combine their talents for great songwriting with lyrical power, plus all of that atmosphere. Of course you can ask all sorts of questions: Is Careful With That Axe, Eugene really such a masterwork, when it is only properly performed live, and often not even then? Are all 24 minutes of Echoes really necessary or is it merely the world's slowest blues jam? Is The Final Cut a complete piece of unmusical shit or a heartbreaking diatribe against war or what? Why would I tolerate the sweaty disco rhythms of Run Like Hell and Another Brick In the Wall (Part 2) but not the same rhythms on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack? How can it be that Dark Side of the Moon is so good when so much of it is not even complete songs? It really comes down to many different things that secure their place. There's something in Pink Floyd for everyone who is interested in the curious junction between the banal and the bizarre, or expanding your ideas of rock music beyond simple ideas and simple song structures, or in interesting ideas about life and the way it's lived. Few bands were as experimental as Pink Floyd, and none combined their experimentalism with more solid backing than they did. Like all great bands they sucked more and more as they got older, but you can't hold it against their body of work. I think they sum up most (not all, but close) of what I like about rock music.
| A- | 1967 | The Piper at the Gates of Dawn |
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Has there ever been an album that so successfully combined childhood stories with large quantities of hallucinogenic drugs? Not on your life! This is the only full album with Syd Barrett, whose hand hath wrought all but one song on here (Roger's moronic poem and tolerable freakout jam Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk). There are happy melodies and goofy arrangements littered all over the album like delicious psychedelic ear candies and then some seriously weird "sonic experiments". Roger's song was one of them, but the most experimental track by far is Interstellar Overdrive. This song takes some getting used to; it is simply not a pleasant listen. A cool riff at the beginning devolves into a rhythmless morass with tons of feedback, alarming keyboards, and wacked-out plucking before suddenly cohering again to end on a cosmic splutter. What saves the song from being a random structure-less mess is how cool it is. It comes off as muddled thanks in large part to the overdubbing (Syd was notorious for being unable to play a song the same way twice), but its growling, alien sound is, in its own way, a perfect response to the sillier, more lightweight psychedelia going on at the time. It can't compete with Astronomy Domine, of course, which is |
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| B+ | 1968 | A Saucerful of Secrets |
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Pay close attention that that awesome bass line that opens the album - it is the only time in their entire discography where Pink Floyd kicks off an album with such a bang. Maybe it's consolation for the fact that with Syd's self-destruction, the rest of the band members generally mill about aimlessly. Syd may have been - OK, definitely was - crazy, but at least he brought a sense of fun and a knack for great melodies. With him off in outer space, however, everyone else was at a loss. They made the fateful choice to replace him as lead guitarist with David Gilmour, whose sound would quickly go on to transform the band entirely. On A Saucerful of Secrets it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what difference he makes because Syd still contributes material - if you can call Jugband Blues "material" - and continues to exert an air of general astral psychosis, but their two approaches are most easily contrasted when A Saucerful of Secrets is put alongside Interstellar Overdrive. The latter was noisy, messy, and anarchic, while the former sounds much more calculated and deliberate. They both share elements of randomness probably intended to embody a sense of disorientation (meaning pointless piano stumbling by Rick replaces Syd's overdubbed guitars), but A Saucerful of Secrets is more truly a space song even if it doesn't have the other's explicit title. For one, it's about a battle in space, with the different setions representing preparation, conflict, and requiem. For another, it sounds much smoother and colder. Interstellar Overdrive was completely up-front about its bizarreness, but A Saucerful of Secrets is more subtle. |
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| C+ | 1969 | More |
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Now that they'd gotten rid of Syd, the band's commercial fortunes seemed perilous, and while A Saucerful of Secrets proved that they could write songs on their own, they were still stuck in the space rock image they'd crafted for themselves. Barbet Schroeder commissioned them to do a soundtrack about hippies and drug abuse, and they came up with four classic tracks and a fair-sized portion of filler and wastes of time. Not a bad ratio, though the filler is unspectacular at best. Those four good tracks, though - all Roger's contributions – are really beautiful: I can't get enough of Cirrus Minor's lazy acoustic strumming slowly giving way to a church organ hymn to outer space that equals the coda of A Saucerful of Secrets for serene beauty, and little do I care if the great poetic imagery in the lyrics were plagiarized from some nameless ancient Chinese poet. It's absolutely crazy that something as simple as that little twittery sound effect can sound so evocative. That's a problem with the subtler and more abstract type of music Pink Floyd tended to make: while certainly pleasant, it can often miss the solid foundations of more traditional song structures. But, as in Cirrus Minor and the other triumphs, what could have ended up sounding like a boring dirge turned out to be tuneful and fulilling. The Crying Song's laid-back shuffle with vibraphones abounds in subtle melody, and Green Is the Colour has a great folky feel and a happy melody, though it's actually about some jealous woman from the movie. Cymbaline has to be the best track on here. I love the slightly nervous feeling of the verses that gets amplified by the very relaxed piano and acoustic guitar. It's just a really stripped-down and lovely gem of a tune that happens to be about a nightmare. I always smile at the "Will the final couplet rhyme?" line, because guess which is the only couplet in the song that doesn't rhyme? Very rarely does the band write these very quietly pretty songs because they're usually off trying to write either psychedelia or huge grandiose concept albums. I mean, yeah you'll have stuff like Goodbye Blue Sky and whatnot, but too rarely do you get the sense of Roger or David sitting down with a guitar and trying to write a modest little tune for themselves to enjoy. To my dismay, also accompanying those songs are The Nile Song and Ibiza Bar, 2 mediocre cock-rock aggressive blues numbers that sound exactly the same, like normal blues songs set to LOUD as David tries to sound tough. What hurts the album is that the rest of it is a bunch of instrumentals that don't do much to distinguish themselves and which you'll probably have mixed feelings about. I am sure they work wonderfully as background music for the film, but on the companion album they cross the line between "evocative" and "boring as hell" and give the listener an excellent opportunity to study the insides of their eyelids. Up the Khyber sounds like it belongs in the middle part of Interstellar Overdrive, Party Sequence somehow involved the cooperation of all 4 band members to produce a flute/drum combo that betters The Grand Vizier's Garden Party only by being shorter, Main Theme has a neat creepy beginning but is the drum part is just a little too involving for what should have been more placid, More Blues is generic blues, Dramatic Theme has a neat guitar solo with nice delay/echo filters and a cool mounting tension set over a slow version of the opening bass riff to Let There Be More Light, and Quicksilver is like listening to the inside of a puddle IN SPACE. It's basically an entire song based on the keyboard noodle in the Live at Pompeii version of Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun. Which is fine; I do enjoy it since it has the nice sound of the intro to Main Theme without the out-of-place drums, I just never listen to it even though it has that great sense of creepiness about it. See what I mean about mood? I actually think Quicksilver is really good for being essentially a tossoff, but I can't imagine anyone other than an astronaut on heroin listening to it frequently. Oh yeah, there's also A Spanish Piece, which is definitely in the bottom 5 songs they ever did. David's fucking stupid idea of a quick snatch of Spanish guitar with the most horrific fake Spanish accent ever rivals Seamus for sheer worthlessness. This album doesn't flow particularly well and it's hard to get excited about, but the good tracks are really good; it's a shame their like start to become rarer and rarer. However, it's clear even to me that Pink Floyd was not excited about this album: it was recorded in eight days! While the band was still giving concerts! Seen in this light, I almost think more highly of the band for producing this, and they liked it at least a little too. Cymbaline and Green Is the Color would go on to become live favorites for a few years, the latter frequently played live in a medley with Careful With That Axe, Eugene for some reason, while the rest would fade away. Curiously, that's more attention than their next, superior soundtrack album would get. |
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| B- | 1969 | Ummagumma |
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Given how different the band sounded live than in the studio, the live disc is pretty much essential. In concert, all of those vaguely weird space songs dramatically expanded under the influence of a type of psychedelia which owed very little to flower power and a whole lot more to what was literally "far out", like a Woodstock held somewhere out on the rings of Saturn. Astronomy Domine (doubled in length), Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun (also doubled), and A Saucerful of Secrets all have a clear mood of "outer space" to them. David and Rick do most to convey that sense of space: David's wild and frenzied yet careful and controlled guitar shrieks soar over Rick's calm but eerie keyboard meanderings while Nick and Roger back them up with heavy and relentless exercises in hypnosis. It's magic. These aren't jams to bore you to sleep (just try and go to sleep during the middle section of A Saucerful of Secrets), and they're not self-indulgent jam sessions to display instrumental prowess (what prowess?), they're really careful, coordinated structures that convey the abstract astral nature of this type of music perfectly. Careful With That Axe, Eugene is unearthly, possibly even more than the other songs because it isn't even about psychedelia anymore, it's about menacing, brooding, creepy tension which releases in an explosive burst unparalled anywhere else. Even though the songs are poorly mixed, they're essential. The much less essential studio half is about experimentation of the unsuccessful variety. It's unsuccessful because, despite sounding like nothing in the band's catalog (and very little like anything else at the time), it's remarkably unappealing and is only really innovative on first listen, when you are confronted by the cacophony and discord and strangeness of the tracks (some of which aren't "songs"). Only David's songs get to you in a visceral and enduring way, which forces me to describe the entire album using nothing more than pure genre terminology: a long classical piano suite, a folk song and a sound effects collage, a guitar pedal workout, and a “deconstructionist” drum solo bookended with flute solos. Very rarely do you ever find an album in which there are so few emotions, not even of the cold spacey kind that the band loved so much. I personally think that it's IMPOSSIBLE to be moved by any of these pieces, because they are not the works of people looking to truly touch the listener in any way. A record that has no emotional qualities is destined to become a historical curiosity judged by its technical characteristics, like turning art criticism into a paint-by-numbers comparison. So, onto the paintings: Sysyphus might be a personal triumph for Rick Wright, who would never get so much space on an album to himself again, but what is he trying to do with this "experimentation"? It sounds so impressive at the start, but I feel no connection at all to what happens in between save for the second part, since it sounds like he's making it up as he goes along. The beginning of the fourth part at one point intrigued me because I love that Mellotron sound, but there are all sorts of vaguely disturbing guitar string sounds in the background that leave me cold. Is he trying to tell a story? Is he trying to show off his talent? Without other band members to give him direction, he just bangs away and hopes it sounds "spooky". Roger spends one of his two contributions on Grantchester Meadows, a folk song which innovates not at all with meaningless pastoral lyrical imagery and funny fly-swatting sound effects at the end, and the hilariously-titled Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In a Cave and Grooving With a Pict is a briefly amusing display of tape loops and sound modulation, but it's obviously nothing more than an extended joke. David's knack for fairly pleasant songs (at least for now) rewards us with The Narrow Way, which is actually his first-ever composition. Even if his guitar tricks produce nothing more than a warm, sunny sense of peace that by degrees gets vaguely disturbing and then just strange, they're still more pleasant than anything else here. If Grantchester Meadows is pastoralism about an English country field, then The Narrow Way is pastoralism about some kind of alien planet. It was based on previous experiments he did during the Zabriskie Point sessions, but I like it anyway. In one of life's little ironies, Nick's interpretation of a drum solo in The Grand Vizier's Garden Party is by far the most experimental song on the album. I don't expect his tuning and detuning some tom-toms for 7 minutes to ever be topped. I certainly hope not, anyway. At least his wife's flute parts are pretty. Overall I just can't see where these guys are truly innovating. Ummagumma is never heartfelt, frequently dull, and constantly weird. It sold terribly even in that prog-crazy era, and I can't imagine there are many people these days who play this record frequently. They didn't carry much of this sound with them in future albums (in fact they regret ever having made it), and you didn't see a lot of other bands hastily taking notes whenever the romantic strains of The Grand Vizier's Garden Party wafted from the airwaves, so I can't give this album many points for something this pointless. That's really the only way you can judge a self-consciously "experimental" album: did any of this take? Not really. |
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| B+ | 1970 | Atom Heart Mother |
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Atom Heart Mother is the most "normal" progressive rock album the band ever did. It has all the fashionable prog elements swathed in the familiar Pink Floyd production: an epic on side 1 that clearly got most of the group's care and attention devoted to it, a bunch of short more-or-less solo tracks on side 2, and the fairly inappropriate use of an orchestra. As a side note, it's funny to me how all these bands tried to show that rock could be "progressive" and "move forward" by utilizing the tools of the previous century. I realize that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it is fascinating to hear a space rock band trying to fit guitar solos in between horn passages in order to derive a "new" kind of music. The heavy weight of Ummagumma is still oppressive: Roger hadn't figured out how to write actual poetry, David hadn't figured out how to hook up his guitar pedals to make that majestic soar he would become so famous for, and Rick was still under the impression that they would hit it big as a piano pop band any day now. Atom Heart Mother is their attempt at writing one of those big classical-rock suites that were in vogue. It starts off with a very nice brass theme, but goes downhill immediately. The main problem is that it's too long for its content. As the single longest uninterrupted opus the band would ever produce, the fact that it's an aimless mass of melodies and restrained "experiments" sucks. What was neat about all those old jams is that even at their worst they were still hypnotic and weird enough that it sounded like the band had a plan. Atom Heart Mother is a little too tedious over the long run, as it is more revelatory than Zabriskie Point session outtakes with a horn section under them, but there's not anything as well-written as any of their previous epics within it. I can't be too cruel, however: there's some excellent chanting choirs which approach A Saucerful of Secrets for abstract beauty, some weird but groovy organ sound effects Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun-style, brief but truly tearful viola solos, and David delivers a pile of stellar bluesy guitar riffs. The main problem is that it's a whole stack of stuff that takes a long time to sit through, but since it doesn't have a narrative or a clear sense of internal progression, it ends up sounding like the world's longest overture to an opera never written. If only they had featured more of David, this could have been a Dogs-level classical epic 7 years early. Alas. I just think that this song isn't quite as experimental as the band meant it to be and gives too much of a sense of fooling around in the studio. I can't claim that the second half of the record is brilliant either, though at least it is not bad by any stretch of the imagination. Roger is still under the impression that his two strengths are sound effects and folk songs (hey, actually...), so after sprinkling the last song with the former, the latter is made manifest in If, which has the honor of being the very first full-fledged patented "I hate everyone and everything" song he would produce. It's kind of nice! It turns into a jam at the end too, but just listen to that lazy, spacy guitar solo and pleasant piano background, which help gives the impression of actual feeling that was so lacking on Grantchester Meadows. The real surprise of the record is that that mysterious dark horse songwriter Rick comes out of left field and writes the best song on the album. While I'm not the world's biggest fan of Summer '68's lyrics – if I want a song about fucking groupies I'll listen to AC/DC or Kiss, okay? – I AM a big fan of the catchy singalong melody and great energetic breakdowns. It boggles my mind that he could write short pop tunes like this and yet consider stuff like Sisyphus listenable. David's Fat Old Sun is absolutely the perfect song for lying around on a lazy warm afternoon and smoking weed and he totally knew it. It even mentions rolling joints in the lyrics! I think the very faint tolling bells got reused for High Hopes decades later, but who knows. Sadly Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast is a dull throwback to the More school of pointless instrumentals. The first piano and organ part is clearly a tossoff, the middle part sounds exactly like Unknown Song from Zabriskie Point, and if the last part is not a rejected section from Atom Heart Mother I will give you a dollar. The nicest thing I can say about the song's "concept" (it's exactly what the title says) is that it was probably more fun to be performed live, when the band would actually have tea on stage. On vinyl, it is 13 whole minutes of absolutely nothing. Now, I realize that this is not actually offensive to the ears, and that it's perfectly possible to like this song. My question is: why? Why would you waste your time to do the mental work so that this filler track (which takes up ONE-THIRD OF THE ALBUM) sounds like it isn't a joke on the audience when you could be listening to actual music? Luckily the next studio album manages to avoid most of the present pitfalls without making too many new ones. |
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| B+ | 1971 | Relics |
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I hate rarities collections that toss in readily available album tracks that you already own and place them totally out of context mixed in with the new stuff because now you don't know what to listen for. Is it supposed to facilitate compare/contrasting? If so, acid pop singles like Arnold Layne and See Emily Play sound like they are coming from a completely different band when put next to Interstellar Overdrive, which is probably the best example I know of the anti-pop single, and there aren't any album singles like Astronomy Domine to see the similarities. Is it supposed to showcase artistic growth? In that case, they should have put the tracks in chronological order so you're not jumping all over the place and making it sound like the band has no idea what they're doing. Is it supposed to present all the sides of the band? Then I would definitely have switched out stuff like The Nile Song, Remember a Day, and Bike for stuff like Astronomy Domine, Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun, and Cymbaline. Cirrus Minor could stay, but I don't think it's any more emblematic of their music in this period than the missing singles were. There was plenty of stuff even at the time like Point Me at the Sky or It Would Be So Nice that was unavailable on albums which would have presented a more complete picture of their early days, so now you have to shell out for the Shine On box set to get those early singles and B-sides. The best move would have been to take all the unreleased stuff at once and make a totally new album, because their singles around this time are superb little melodic gems that give you a totally different picture of the band than stuff like Interstellar Overdrive. Regardless, I can't fault this collection too much because it does offer a reasonably complete picture of all the facets of those early days: far-out space rockers, weird pop-rockers, and hilariously inept hard-rockers. Syd's Arnold Layne and See Emily Play are exactly the sort of funny, catchy acid pop which would have fit in perfectly on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the former being about a cross-dresser and the latter being sort of a children's tale about children's tales as Emily learns to play games to distract herself from her childhood fears. You can definitely tell they were done back in Syd's "good days", because even if they're weird, they're hilariously upbeat and fun. Rick contributes more of his patented piano pop with Paintbox, which is bouncy and entertaining until you realize that it's just more of his depressing observations on life set to an inappropriately upbeat backing track. I'm of mixed feelings about him as a songwriter: on the one hand he can write some really pleasant music, but on the other hand it would have been a terrible direction for Pink Floyd to head in had he had more creative input because I find his songs incredibly banal. Set the Controls-style nonsense lyrics are one thing, because it is not the literal meaning of the song that's important but the slightly eerie calm created by the sound of the words, but when I hear something like Paintbox, I am obviously supposed to be actually empathizing with Rick about... what? You got drunk and now your girlfriend is pissed? Oh, OK, thanks for sharing. Speaking of Set the Controls and nonsense lyrics, Roger's Julia Dream is clearly a trial run for the former song, which is unfortunately meaningless AND dull, lacking Rick's sparkle and substituting an aimless flute. It sounds like a Syd ballad but, Roger being at least marginally more sane than Syd, couldn't quite duplicate his lunatic magic. He did a bit better with Biding My Time, which I like a whole lot. It starts out as normal 12-bar blues, but Rick's piano helps the song "climb" to a loungey climax where he starts wailing away on a trombone! It may not be the best blues-rock in the world, but it's worth it for the novelty alone. The only song that makes me truly angry is the ruined album version of Careful With That Axe, Eugene, which has none of the power of the live version. First, the tempo is WAY too fast to be as slow and threatening as the song needs to be. Second, the vibraphone noodling destroys the sinister purpose of the buildup. Third, and worst, they TOTALLY fuck up the climax of the song by tossing in the scream barely a third of the way into the song, mixing it so low as to be wacky instead of shocking. Now all you get is a 6-minute boring jam instead of a frightening allegory of someone being quietly stalked and cut to pieces. Forget this recording and take a listen to the live versions on Ummagumma and Live at Pompeii, they're infinitely better. Aside from that disaster, none of the songs (The Nile Song excepted) are that bad, and the good new stuff is a refreshing look at the band's roots. If only it had more rarities, Relics would be a great buy, but as it is it's merely a good one. |
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| A- | 1971 | Meddle |
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Meddle marks the beginning of the band's classic period, where they finally found their direction and started writing the songs that they would become famous for. There are only a few traces of fucking around on this album; the songwriting is much more polished and the production is vastly improved to make it much clearer and more focused than Atom Heart Mother. The band had always experimented with strange sounds and song structures, but now they had the technical skill to make their ideas come alive. Somewhat paradoxically, two of the songs on here (San Tropez and Seamus) are among the silliest they would ever do, with the former being a bizarre Roger lounge-jazz number and the latter being the world's only 12-bar blues with a dog on lead vocals. Why they ended up on the tracklist is anyone's guess, but the somewhat jarring sound of a happy Roger Waters is fairly refreshing and the soulful wail of their friend's dog is amusing for at least a listen or two. The band does have a sense of humor after all! San Tropez is also where Rick's meandering piano skills fit in maybe the best out of their entire catalog, since he makes the song sound like a vacation. The rest of the songs on the first side are all actual serious songs that are written much more skillfully than on their previous albums. One of These Days is practically the only song in their catalog that could even remotely be considered "rocking" and it's a welcome change from the days of The Nile Song because it doesn't try to swagger and sound tough, it just sounds lean and mean. It has a fantastic galloping beat with dual bass guitars, punctuated with electronically treated cymbal rolls and an ominous, snarling guitar solo that sounds like a much angrier Careful With That Axe, Eugene with a more headbanging coda. A Pillow of Winds and Fearless are beautiful if similar-sounding laid-back folk songs in the vein of the better material on More, though A Pillow of Winds is slightly sleepier (and I think the lyrics are about a dead guy ascending to heaven with his girlfriend or something). It has some beautiful slide guitar solos that sound like an updated The Narrow Way and a cool otherworldly vibe to it. Fearless has become something of a favorite among Liverpool fans for its inclusion of the team's theme song, but I think the coda goes on for a little too long after the song proper ends. The vocal melody, though, is gorgeous, and the lyrics have an interesting sort of abstract motivational quality to them. The second side is the draw for most fans because it features one of their most dramatic accomplishments. Echoes shows how neatly they learned to absorb typical rock source material like blues, funk, and ambient music and completely repurpose it. They finally learned to make the structure of the music fit the mood, replacing the complex but meaningless Heart Mother with a deceptively simple but vivid epic. I'm not going to claim every single second of it is gold - I'd cut a bit of the buildup, and maybe a few minutes of the seagull noises - but it's a fantastic illustration of how to make incredibly abstract music sound like it's telling a fulfilling story without ever specifying what that story is. Any description of the song must by its nature be somewhat ambiguous and hazy, simply because the song itself is so nebulous. The lyrics are almost meaningless poetry about interpersonal relationships that were changed from the original, more spaced-themed ones since the band was getting tired of their "space rock" image, but the song still sounds like space to to a lot of people. Unlike Atom Heart Mother, with which it shares a cut-and-paste compositional approach, each little section builds on the one before it to form a tremendous epic rather than merely a collection of chunks. Supposedly it was originally titled Return of the Son of Nothing Parts 1-24, but I certainly don't hear 24 distinctly different parts. When I listen to it I get a mental image of someone standing on a beach summoning some kind of sea spirit out of the depths of the ocean: the mid-section with the lonesome guitar solos over the seagull noises sounds exactly like someone calling out to a huge empty space, and the long buildup sounds like the sea monster or whatever rising up out of the ocean to burst triumphantly to the surface. Or I could be making that up. The song CAN get tiresome, I'll admit, since a good portion of it relies on that tricky concept of "atmosphere" to sustain it, but overall I think the song moves from the melancholy verses to the stunning climax and back again nearly flawlessly, and, as the edited version on Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd shows, once you start trimming pieces you start to reduce the overall effect. As far as side-long epics go (and you can compare it to the magnum opus of whatever your progressive rock band of choice is), it's undeniable that Echoes resonates at least as strongly today as it did when it was written. That eerily precise production alone desserves a listen. |
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| A+ | 1971 | Live at Pompeii |
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I think Live at Pompeii is their finest official fully live album/video. The video is pretty interesting, but the music from it is even more interesting, bettering the live portion of Ummagumma with superior performances and a better track list (though they sadly dropped Astronomy Domine). If you listen to live performances from this epoch, it's apparent that up until 1973 Pink Floyd was always happiest performing live as a sort of club band to the stars. Their songs, as I've said, get stretched out into bursts of melody and tripped-out guitarwork over steady hypnotic rhythms that unfold in stages to reach what logically should be identical to any one of thousands of boring-ass psychedelic-era jams, but are actually psychologically fulfilling and interesting journeys. The "confined innovation" you'll hear in a 20-minute version of Interstellar Overdrive might lack the spark and fire of other groups, but take Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun, which reaches its ultimate apex here as far as I'm comcerned. I've never heard anything like that quiet part at the halfway point where Nick takes a break so you can hear the slow, heated pulse of the bass along with that lonesome "calling out into the void" guitar part and an inhumanly eerie keyboard glissando, and how can you get any more vivid or evocative of anything than that? That calm, liquid trance of emanating silence and stillness is crystal-clear to me the way it wasn't on Ummagumma. That same aura of slow perfection applies to Careful With That Axe, Eugene, which is also better than previously. I love comparing live versions of this song almost more than any other, just because of how "fragile" the song is in spite of its simplicity. Even though it has the world's simplest bass line, stupidest lyric, and barely changes chords at all, it's a sharp example of the band's ability to make this abstract music "mean" something. Here the song benefits immensely from the slower, more shiver-inducing tempo and the longer build-up before the scream in spite of being shorter and having the little advance whispers Roger makes. Likewise, A Saucerful of Secrets also receives an upgrade in the form of sharper drumming, absolutely wonderful guitar effects in the "Syncopated Pandemonium" and "Storm Signal" portions of the song, and MUCH better vocals in "Celestial Voices". It too is slightly truncated, but I can sacrifice a little bit of ominous tone for that incredible screaming tone David pulls out. I know David catches some flak for his supposed weakness at improvisation, but those hair-raising licks he comes up with certainly convince me. Rick also imparts the full majesty of the battle's intended requiem quite well. There are also three Meddle songs on here, though one is the dreaded Seamus which unfortunately gets a new life with a new name as Mademoiselle Nobs. I have to admit that watching the video makes the song a bit more enjoyable as you get to see the dog howling away while David plays a slow blues 12-bar on harmonica. One of These Days shows up too, in a more rocking version that improves on the somewhat abstract and restrained studio version. As one of the very few legitimate rockers the band ever did, it is only fitting that the song get a more active and intense rendition live. Echoes also comes off very well. I'm not a fan of it being split in two to bookend the rest of the concert, though it has this great little bass "cooldown" noise at the end of the first half which redeems the break a bit. It's mostly note-perfect, down to the seagull noises in the middle and everything, but I don't think they get the ecstatic triumphal climax quite right due to the lack of the legions of overdubbed guitars on the studio version. In any case, it is certainly a fine version that's hard to top. The whole album is hard to top, mostly because of the changes that would start to happen to the band. Live at Pompeii is not the last time any of these songs would be played (except for Mademoiselle Nobs, I suppose), but it marks the end of Pink Floyd's period as a hip underground band where they could play all these crazy old songs. The video features the band rehearsing and recording pieces of Dark Side of the Moon, which would transform them as a band completely. For this concert, they played in a deserted Roman amphitheater, but soon enough they would be playing in the huge stadiums that would eventually set them on the path to The Wall. I listen to this album and I hear the band playing the songs they want in the way they want without having drunken idiots screaming to hear Money yet again. This careful, nuanced playing style they had developed, with every band member fitting into their place - Rick and David as lead mood-setters with Nick and Roger as steady rhythm - would have to vanish because careful, nuanced music couldn't fit in the stadiums. The band wouldn't stop making great music, of course (they had only just begun!), but go jump ahead to Delicate Sound of Thunder and hear the difference. This is the absolute end of the space period and the start of something bigger. |
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| A- | 1972 | Obscured By Clouds |
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Take a careful listen to the slow, simmering heat of the synth noises that open up the album and how well David's guitar adds in just the right amount of disassociated atmosphere. It's dispassionate yet enthralling, not quite the perfect album opener despite its steady pulse and gritty tone, but easily in contention. Despite it being a soundtrack, the band has finally figured out how to write an entire album that actually flows well together. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn had its own lunatic sense of progression in the sense that no arrangement of the album tracks worked any better than Syd's demented sense of order, but finally the band has fully recovered from Ummagumma and written an album of great songs that take the listener back and forth across the whole disc without the urge to skip songs or shake their heads in disappointment at clashing moods and styles. Remember on More how those stupid rockers would get tossed in between dreamy folk songs or nearly silent instumentals as if the band just didn't care about the jarring transitions? Not here! There's a beautiful balance between the songs that's matched by the balance between the members. The only negative consequence of the new order is that now that the songs are getting a bit more normal, Rick seems to be retreating from the band's sound just a bit. He plays on most songs, but aside from a few spots on the instrumentals, he has settled into more of a background atmospheric role instead of the centerpiece position he held previously. I might be imagining it but Burning Bridges is the only song where it sounds like he had any input at all. Is this the work of Roger? Examination of the writing credits reveals that he co-wrote five songs, but three of those are instrumentals and he doesn't have a solo credit. David's gritty funk guitar has moved to the forefront to the point where I don't even think songs like The Gold It's In the... HAVE keyboards in them! This might be the most "down to earth" album the band has thanks almost solely to that guitar tone, and though I miss the ethereal production of Echoes, it'll return on the next album and this is a nice change anyway. Despite the shifting currents of band politics, this still is a very democratic-sounding album with a neat balance on a spectrum from slower melancholy songs to faster pseudo-rockers that thankfully lean more towards the One of These Days sound than the The Nile Song sound. Even the instrumentals, of which there are only four this time, manage to segue into the songs with lyrics nicely and don't sound nearly as rushed or half-assed as on More. Like I said, Obscured By Clouds is almost as good of an opener as Speak to Me on the next album, and When You're In manages to keep its repetitive guitar licks a respectably driving effort, thanks to some passable drumming and keyboard work. Mudmen even has some truly wrenching and passionate guitar solos, but Rick somehow decided that the song needed a "poisoned" keyboard tone I don't appreciate. The only thing I hate about Absolutely Curtains is that stupid aboriginal chanting, because there are some some really good meditative synth tones on it that make the album sound like a finished voyage that's just returned home, presumably at the end of the movie. The lyrics are starting to fall into place too: except for Stay, ANOTHER Rick-written song about the emptiness after sex (what a fun guy to tour with he must have been), the songs are about adventure or mortality, the latter subject which would of course begin to feature so prominently in future albums. I'm not sure that they have much to do with the movie they were written for, but they're great on their own and form a sort of mini-concept album. Burning Bridges and The Gold It's In the... are where the main character sets out on a journey full of hope, and then gets gradually worn down by his mortality in Wots... Uh the Deal, Childhood's End, and Free Four. Free Four has a hilariously fast and bouncy beat that contrasts with the morbid lyrics that reference Roger's dead father in perhaps the happiest incident of foreshadowing (forelightening?) I've ever heard, but my favorite song is Wots... Uh the Deal because of that beautiful acoustic guitar, piano track, and soaring solo, plus the sad story about a man grown old before he can reap the benefits of living. Childhood's End somehow compresses the central theme of Dark Side of the Moon down to a single couplet with some good poetic imagery, though it uses David's trademark "rhyme every line with the one before" lyric scheme. Neat funk rhythm though. Overall this is a wonderful album, easily deserving of a place next to Dark Side of the Moon and unjustly overlooked by most fans for reasons I can't understand. Some of the instrumentals here are minute-for-minute just as strong as any of the whooshier passages of Echoes or Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and if you thought David's playing on Time was good, Childhood's End is a must-hear. |
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| A+ | 1973 | Dark Side of the Moon |
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With no other album I've heard is it as difficult to separate the effect the album has on me from the notes that produce it. Probably this is true for most listeners too: though Dark Side of the Moon has sold a legendary number of copies and cast its shadow over multiple generations of musicians and listeners, no other record sounds quite like it and not even any of the band's other albums can be said to truly recycle its components or directly follow in its footsteps. It has the "leisurely pop" songwriting style of Obscured By Clouds and even some of the same lyrical style, but its emotional impact is far beyond its predecessor. Part of that is most likely due to that otherworldly clarity and focus that the crystalline production gives it, which is leagues beyond anything they'd done prior save Echoes. It's because of that production that it comes off nearly as "druggy" as The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, its acid-drenched ancestor, and it's also the reason why even though I've listened to the album an uncountable number of times, the best I can do when trying to pinpoint exactly how the album unleashes its effects on the listener is appealing to the somewhat nebulous concept of "balance". It's harmonious in every way, right up to the legendary sound mixing and right down to the band credits: everyone has their own niche in each song to play off the others, and everyone has a writing credit, even Nick. It's the polar opposite of Ummagumma since all of their talents are combined instead of scattered to the four winds. David throws in some truly beautiful layered guitar solos, like those quiet, slightly melancholy notes at the beginning of Breathe, or the gritty pulses in Any Colour You Like. Roger tosses in some great basslines, not just the infamous 7/4 groove of Money but also neat funk lines on Time and the hypnotic rhythm of Us and Them. Rick works in majestic keyboards all over the place and adds in a poignant serenity to the whole thing, particularly on The Great Gig In the Sky but also Us and Them and Any Colour You Like. Even Nick gets in moments like the clever roto-tom opening to Time or the fascinating counterpoint in The Great Gig In the Sky that make me take back all I've ever said about his inability to drum in more than one pattern. He still can't, but the way he steadily gets more and more energetic on Eclipse to close out the climax is spot-on. It makes a complete mockery of the idea that "technical proficiency" will ever be a substitute for the ability to make your talents support your message. The message, for once, is finally worthy of serious evaluation (well, more serious than "I've got a bike / You can ride it if you like") thanks to Roger's lyrical monopoly: Time is precious. Life is full of things which don't make sense. Insanity sucks. Roger manages to discuss weighty topics such as these in an unpretentious and relatable style, avoiding any desire to overwhelm the listener with occult or cryptic meanings while still being reasonably clever and poetic. I think he does a good job of making obviously personal issues sound universal (Syd gets a nod in Brain Damage with the line "And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes" that sounds straight from the heart, but aimed at the brain) while avoiding narcissism or empty generalities. Breathe and Time contain succinct exhortations to make the most of your life, Money is a fun condemnation of the rat race, Us and Them condemns the pointlessness of war without descending into a generic protest song, and Brain Damage taken along with Eclipse somehow ends the album on the exact right note of ambiguous comfort after all the discussion of insanity. Though the concept is somewhat loose (Money sounds more aggressive than fearful towards insanity) and the album lacks a narrative, I never get the feeling that the songs were thrown in at random because each of the non-instrumentals tackles a different facet. There are also a number of instrumentals which rank among their most inspired, The Great Gig In the Sky especially. On that track, guest vocalist Clare Torry wails away in an attempt to convey something about the nature of death and it WORKS, all of it. Never has dying sounded so reassuring, much like Money made greed sound danceable. The opener Speak to Me is nothing more than whooshes and sound effects, but what climactic whooshes! The way they slowly raise the tension as the heartbeat gets gradually louder by adding in more and more voices, clinks, and vocal samples and then burst triumphantly into Breathe is the perfect introduction. On the Run may not match Careful With That Axe, Eugene's murderous intensity in its representation of paranoia, but it's certainly hypnotic, what with all those swirling synths and ominous buzzings, and the way you can hear the runner's panting breath only adds to the effect until the explosion of Time obliterates him. Finally, Any Colour You Like has gorgeous "heavenly" cascading synth lines and a great "conflicted" guitar solo that acts as the perfect extended coda to Us and Them even though it's just a jam. Taken individually, all of these songs are wonderful, and each of the non-instrumentals ranks among the band's finest works. But the factors that really assure Dark Side of the Moon its status as a perennial candidate in the silly but unavoidable game of "greatest album of all time" contest are most apparent when the album is examined as a whole. There is absolutely no other album in the world with the same sense of "flow" to it, not even any of their other albums. Part of it is the judicious use of stylistic diversity (they combine jazz, funk, blues, and gospel with straightforward rock and roll), rhythmic diversity (The Great Gig In the Sky slows it down, Money speeds it back up), and emotional diversity (listened to back-to-back, Any Colour You Like and Eclipse sound like they're from completely different albums) to ensure that every song adds something onto the one before it. That production also helps: on a good pair of speakers or headphones, it sounds like every note the band is playing comes from inside your head. Of course, all the good production in the world couldn't cover up awful material, so I don't credit it for Dark Side of the Moon's success, but by the same token, the production isn't a "gimmick" because being able to get the right sound for your instruments isn't some sort of underhanded trick. It helps give the album a "friendly" sound to it in spite of the depressing subject matter. Doesn't the end of Eclipse sound uplifting, somehow? The sound effects also contribute. All those ticking clocks, cash registers, and half-heard voices are placed at exactly the right moments to elicit surprise, alarm, comfort, and humor in a way that blends into the album to the extent that I can't imagine Time without its alarms or Money without its torn register receipts. This meticulous planning ends up feeling very organic and natural because the band actually bothered to think about the effect they wanted to impart to the audience. They had an extraordinary talent for getting inside the head of the listener, both lyrically and musically. As a result, it's the single best blend of "high" art-rock and "low" pop music you're likely to find anywhere. If Dark Side of the Moon has a weakness, it's that it's not ambitious enough: it doesn't truly change the face of rock music and it doesn't attempt to change your life, either. But where those albums with greater pretensions over-reach themselves is where Dark Side of the Moon provides an elegant and modest look at basic human worries that ends up sounding more grandiose, epochal, and yes, "greatest of all time" than any of them. |
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| A+ | 1975 | Wish You Were Here |
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Making a follow-up to Dark Side of the Moon must have seemed like an impossible task, but after their wildly successful tours, it looks like they decided to step back and examine exactly what effect their newfound fame had got them. Syd got a glancing mention on the last album, but this one seems almost entirely dedicated to him, like they missed the past a whole lot more than they used to. The opening Shine On You Crazy Diamond is one of the finest songs in their discography: the lonely and haunting synthesizer notes in first section alone form a masterful requiem. It might seem odd to have such a long epic when, superficially, Wish You Were Here addresses the same subject in a fraction of the running time, but the answer is that the sing-along sense of sadness coming from a 3 minute tune doesn't feel quite the same as the slow, wistful regret produced by that impossibly majestic 4-note guitar riff chiming in out of nowhere after that melancholy wash of synths and guitar plucks. Progressive rock gives (or tries to give) bands a greater vocabulary to explore the finer nuances of rock music freed from the shackles of the verse/chorus format, though not all bands can make use of the greater time and subtlety as well as Pink Floyd did here. I don't think they ever got so close before or since to conveying touching sorrow so well as the first half of this track, even if the title track comes close. Then the lyrics start up and you can see that Roger's skills as a poet are really best used when he is talking about something close to him. His work on Dark Side of the Moon was good, of course, but you can see the difference that personal care makes. It's the same reason why Every Stranger's Eyes off of The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking was so good. It's a great example of the music complementing the lyrics, which the band would start to forget about as Roger slowly assumed iron control of the band. Absolutely great lyrics like "You were caught on the cross fire of childhood and stardom / Blown on the steel breeze / Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger / You legend, you martyr, and shine!" get conveyed with such great force that Syd Barrett's mental collapse becomes a symbol of the Tragically Doomed Artist, rather than just another 60s acid casualty. Shine On You Crazy Diamond is a wonderful example of what you can get when you bring real feelings into rock music. I wish they'd kept the two parts together, because the second half has passages every bit as lovely as the first half even if it's more jam-oriented. I love the fadeout in particular - when I listen to it I picture Syd Barrett slowly fading away, gone but not forgotten. What disappoints me about this album, though, is that after the first half's closing sax passage (which I might have traded for some more lyrics or some more of that wonderful guitar work but I'll let be), for seemingly no good reason at all you get confronted with these ugly sound effects and a scathing denunciation of the mechanical music industry out of nowhere. Welcome to the Machine indeed. While it's not a bad song on its own, I guess, with neat biting synth lines in the middle that drive home the song's message, its placement totally ruins the emotional buildup for me. The band had learned how to make songs that built on each other years ago, so why the shift in tone? Am I supposed to believe that record companies, of all things, were responsible for Syd's schizophrenia instead of, you know, all the LSD he dropped daily? I guess so, since yet another attack on the music industry follows in the for of Have a Cigar. It's also a song that I can't get much moved about, and I would actually go so far as to say that it's completely average. It's kind of plodding and generically bluesy, and they have to bring in Roy Harper to sing it, since Roger apparently couldn't sing it and David wouldn't. It's funny to know that the "By the way, which one's Pink?" line actually happened in reality, but I would have preferred that this stuff get relegated to its own album. I realize the band must have been under tremendous pressure to follow up Dark Side of the Moon with something equally amazing, but to devote two whole songs (nearly half the tracklist, remember) to a simple fuck-you to EMI is kind of lame coming after such a great start. Don't get me wrong, they're fine songs, but they totally kill the emotional progression, which is more important than any chord progression. Luckily Wish You Were Here picks things back up again. It's another great mix of music and lyrics with an absolutely classic "humble" melody and great understated guitar work. While I think the song is slightly too slow and singer-songwriter-ish, as opposed to Shine On You Crazy Diamond's serene grace, it's beautiful nonetheless, and it feels more down-to-earth. It's a good contrast to the epic because you get to hear the same subject presented in different ways. Each fan will have their own preference as to which is the more effective format, but both are undeniably powerful. It's just a shame that, even though the two slightly weaker tracks are hardly terrible, what could have been a more melancholy and personal but equally affecting companion to Dark Side of the Moon gets stuck with material that should be on Animals or something. Hmm, what animal represents an A&R man? Oops, I'm getting ahead of myself. |
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| A+ | 1977 | Animals |
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If the increasingly cretinous behavior of their new-found fans after Dark Side of the Moon had left them nostalgic for the old days, Wish You Were Here's release and the subsequent tour had left them positively angry. Both Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here had allowed for the possibility of their songs reaching the airwaves, but Animals made no such concessions: both versions of Pigs On the Wing are less than 90 seconds long and the others range from over 10 minutes to nearly twice that. Right about here is the time when Roger started to get seriously angry at the world instead of merely contemptuous, which completely changed the band's sound: no longer trippy, weird, dreamy, or sad, now they're pissed-off! It draws in people who are turned off by the band's early psychedelia of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, even the mid-period cleanliness of Dark Side of the Moon, and the later bombast of The Wall because it adds in a strong element of grittiness that I don't think they've showed before. It's |
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| A+ | 1979 | The Wall |
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For many people, The Wall defines teenage angst and isolation, despite the fact that it's a thinly-veiled parable about Roger Waters' feelings about being a rock star with some Syd Barrett references with neither the anxious worry of Pet Sounds or the pained adolesence of Quadrophenia. But there's some truth to that sentiment: The Wall's big, grandiose, operatic exploration of alienation is much more depressing than either of its two competitors and uses the band's knack for sonic textures to |
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| A- | 1981 | Is There Anybody Out There? |
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It seems ironic that the band bothered to tour The Wall - why bother to present in concert an album inspired by complete disgust with your concerts? - but I'm glad they did. In keeping with The Wall's "wall" theme, when they took it on the road they decided to build a wall between the band and the audience, thus providing a handy visual companion to the album's emotional metaphor. I don't think there will ever be a concert more Herculean in size: hundreds of giant white bricks on which movies were projected amongst dazzling light shows, humongous inflatable creatures floating overhead, and giant puppets leering at the audience. The expense of such a spectacle meant the band actually lost money each show, except for Rick, who was hired on at a fixed rate. None of the visual effects come off on the album, but you do get a great sense of how impressive those concerts must have been for the people who were there. Roger should have remembered his last name wasn't Wagner. |
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| A- | 1983 | The Final Cut |
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After The Wall, Roger absolutely could not stop writing anti-war songs. The Final Cut was originally intended to be a collection of leftover material from the film version of The Wall called Spare Bricks that would include unreleased material like What Shall We Do Now? and When the Tigers Broke Free, but Roger eventually decided to make it into its own full-length diatribe against... exactly the same things he ranted about in The Wall! The other band members sort of tacitly agreed – since this was the least band-oriented album since Ummagumma, Roger wrote all the lyrics, sung all but one song, and farmed out most parts (even Nick's drums on the last track!) to faceless session musicians galore. You'll hardly notice if you listen to the albums in order since the antiseptic quality of Pink Floyd productions tended to blur the individual style of the musicians anyway, and the slow deemphasizing of everyone else in the band was so invisibly relentless that you'll have to wrack your brains to dimly recall that you can't actually remember a Rick part since Animals six years ago. Only David contributes anything to Roger's vision: cut-and-paste metallic guitar solos that make the songs feel even more uneven than they already did with Roger's constant shifting between whispering quietly and yelling his head off. He also sings on the band's worst single ever: the abominable Nile Song-throwback Not Now John. The song's ugly brashness does not fit into the mood of the rest of the album in the slightest, and while the lyrics are mildly funny, did he really need to blame bingo for the failures of international diplomacy? Aside from that song, the whole album seems almost scientifically drained of melody, except for Roger's voice, which whirls and swoops, alternating between tender intimacies and pained screaming at the drop of a hat. The music, except for David's aforementioned left-field guitar slashes, consists mainly of the expected sound-effect tricks and soft piano/orchestral backing which is actually quite moving. The only complaint I (and David) would make is that this style of music has absolutely nothing in common with the Pink Floyd of Dark Side of the Moon fame. It's strange to think that as the band became more meaningful they would cease the pure musical exploration they'd done at the beginning of their career. This music has absolutely nothing in common with A Saucerful of Secrets, not even a little bit. It's a whole album of Corporal Clegg. Yes, it's an unbroken polemic about the terrible effects of war upon one British soldier, all of British society, and eventually the entire world. This relentless negativity would be unbearable if the lyrics were merely passable, but this is Roger's peak as a poet and one of the finest anti-war albums ever recorded, in my opinion. The cold and wintry atmosphere is exactly what he's aiming for to support his unrelentingly bleak vision. You'd have to have a heart of stone to remain resolutely unmoved by the chorus and orchestra of, say, When the Tigers Broke Free in order to point fingers at its uneven rhythm and phrasing. I kind of miss the ironically cheery bounce he did for Free Four all those years ago, but when you're telling such sad and gloomy stories as these, humor would only detract. There's not really a single narrative to be found, only a couple of characters whose stories all weave around wars past and present. Some are World War 2 (The Gunner's Dream, When the Tigers Broke Free), some are the Falkland Islands war (The Post-War Dream, Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert, Not Now John), and most of the rest are just general non-specific wars that could be at any time and place (The Fletcher Memorial Home, Southampton Dock, Two Suns in the Sunset). There are also a few songs which deal more with the emotional fallout of war than war itself (Your Possible Pasts, One of the Few, The Hero's Return, Paranoid Eyes, The Final Cut), and it's all so sad. The title track sounds suspiciously like a rewrite of Comfortably Numb, down to the orchestra backing and everything, but the lyrics are even MORE personal and depressing than Comfortably Numb's were. All of The Final Cut is far more negative than The Wall, because without the rest of the band to liven it up, it's a relentless dirge which ends in the elimination of civilization in a nuclear holocaust thanks to Margaret Thatcher (yes, her again). How's that for a feel-good ending? The lyrics are absolutely heartbreaking, and even though this might be the least Pink Floyd-like of any Pink Floyd album, it's an undeniably powerful listen. I guess all of Roger's skill for the next decade got used up on this album, so it's best if you pretend he didn't release another solo album until Amused to Death. Actually, it's best if you pretend his band-mates didn't either.... |
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| C- | 1987 | A Momentary Lapse of Reason |
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Had this album not been such a letdown, I could have ignored David's bizarrely honest choice of a title (he somehow thought his first choice of Signs of Life would have resulted in more jeering from the press. Joke's on you!). Unfortunately, this is a complete travesty which is the yang to The Final Cut's yin, in more ways than one. Where the latter was full of loss and pain, the former is full of meaningless platitudes. Where there once were delicate orchestral arrangements and passionate sentiment, you now get generic mid-80s arena rocker guitar solos and childish vocoder tricks. Don't be fooled by the credit on the sleeve: this is exactly as much a "Pink Floyd" album as The Final Cut was, only instead of Roger's highly personal frustrations about war, you get some of the least personal ruminations on nothing at all you'll ever hear. This is the first truly cynical Pink Floyd album. Even bad albums like Ummagumma were at the very least original and sincere in their badness, but I can hear carbon copies of Terminal Frost's meandering sax and piano on any Kenny G. album I want, and there's no way On the Turning Away was written by someone who graduated high school. It's the lyric sheet that shows you how far the band had fallen: there's only two songs out of ten that actually have any message (and those stolen from Roger's playbook, no less)! On the Turning Away is a near-faceless "Let's care about things, guys!" plea for nothing in particular, and The Dogs of War is perhaps the successful anti-war rant I've heard since, well, Not Now John, only instead of bingo it's long distance phone calls that are to blame for our trouble. Maybe that's progress of a sort, when we as a society evolve to the point where we can create world peace by saving money on our cell phone bills it will truly be a better tomorrow, but in the meantime, I never want to hear The Dogs of War again because of those atrocious lyrics and that awful grinding sound. And that "funky" sax solo. And David's miserable "tough" vocals. At least Seamus isn't their worst song anymore! Progress! It is as plain as day that David took a look at the dubious chart success of his solo album, realized that an album from "David Gilmour, formerly of Pink Floyd" would never sell as well as the real thing, grabbed the obligatory Nick Mason out of his racecars, and did the smart thing. No Rick; due to leftover legal issues from The Wall he was basically a session musician, so this is 100% solo David and I like it less than any of his actual solo albums. It's so disappointing! Signs of Life (it would have been a decent title) is four and a half minutes of NOTHING. It is NOT similar to Echoes or Shine On You Crazy Diamond - in those songs the instrumental sections were ABOUT something, while I bet David wrote, played, and mixed this song in an afternoon just because "All Pink Floyd albums need a spacy introduction". Learning to Fly is about flying planes, nothing more. While it's undoubtedly the most pleasant song on the album, each and every one of those stupid, wooden metaphors gets even more annoying when you learn that it isn't a metaphor at all, and David really wrote a song about how much he loves flying planes. Where's Nick with a song about racing cars, or Rick with something about cocaine? Give me a song about Eugene and his axe any day. Rick does have a sort of spiritual presence here which harkens back to the days of Summer '68: right after Dogs of War, One Slip advises you to be careful of women you meet while dancing, because you could have sex with them and wouldn't that be awful? This stuff isn't insincere, it's just dumb. Anyone can write these songs because they really don't say anything. Luckily there's a truly sincere and emotional guitar solo at the end to save it. That's something else I don't like about the album - David succumbs to the lure of the 80s and tosses in bunches of Pete Townshend-reject electronic loops (most notably in One Slip and Sorrow) and doesn't solo enough, and without him there's nothing left. Sorrow is the ONLY song on the second half of the album that I like, and it's due to his fantastically dark and slightly ominous guitar work that it's just about the only thing that sounds related to Pink Floyd at all. Yet Another Movie's point escapes me entirely and bores as much as it confuses with lame atmosphere and lyrics that seem to be a movie about child abuse or something. I just assume that both A New Machines are hilarious pranks that the recording engineers forgot to erase. Yes, I DO get tired of the waiting - waiting for some actual songs to show up! It's kind of interesting how much worse those two filler tracks are than the atmospheric tracks on The Wall. I like them much less than Vera, for example, because Vera, again, had a POINT to it. Nothing on this album has a point, but rather than returning the band to the meaningless-but-innovative early days, David was stuck. Cash is the only possible motivating factor for this entry in their discography, and only a very few okay songs like Learning to Fly and Sorrow give you a reason to listen to it at all. |
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| C- | 1988 | Delicate Sound of Thunder |
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Say what you want about late-Roger-era Pink Floyd - the increasingly "conceptual" albums, the bloated touring bands, the mounting isolation from their fans, the shift from writing "songs" to "sound effects collages" - at least they were still a band whose performances were based on fresh new music. This band exists solely to sell concert tickets. |
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| C+ | 1994 | The Division Bell |
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The return of Rick Wright makes this feel much more like Pink Floyd, but that just makes the absence of Roger Waters even more glaring. The band felt so too - several songs address him directly, and the "non-communication" theme of the album couldn't be more transparent. It is a real shame thatRoger was not back on board, because this could easily have been one of Pink Floyd's albums if it had more originality and coherence. David Gilmour has some of his most soaring and beautiful guitar work to date all over the record. |
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| B- | 1995 | Pulse |
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Pay close attention that that awesome bass line that opens the album - it is the only time in their entire discography where Pink Floyd kicks off an album with such a bang. Maybe |
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