WISH YOU WERE HERE

Wish You Were Here followed up the divine Dark Side of The Moon, so it had huge shoes to fill, but the ratings and fanfare this album has really baffles me. I don't consider WYWH to be the greatest Floyd album and I sure don't consider it a "masterpiece" like DSOTM or even Animals. What WYWH does is take the Floyd into a new direction with influence from DSOTM, Meddle and even Atom Heart Mother, but it doesn't really progress on those efforts. If anything it seems to be a sort of rehashing of certain elements of Pink Floyd's canon. For most artists, WYWH would be their magnum opus, but for Pink Floyd it is, unfortunately, a mediocre offering.

Track by Track:

SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND I-V : After an extraneous build-up of synth and some Gilmour blues guitar soloing, the all-too-famous four note motif is struck and the song takes off. For some reason this excitement quickly plateaus when the singing begins and it becomes a bit of a standard track. It is very ambient, sleepy and somewhat dry-sounding. The guitar parts add a sort of liquid to keep it from becoming too desert-like. Powerful lyrics, intense build-up, flat singing and then followed up with the horns. Ugh. Once Floyd attached itself to the saxophone and soulful background singers it continued with this element (which sometimes works and sometimes does not work) for the remainder of its existence (even Waters' solo efforts seem to be dominated by female singers wailing about while he merely talks lyrics to repetitious minimalist background music). Substitute the sax for Dave's playing or Rick's soloing (as in Parts VI-IX) and you got a much better track.

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE : A lazier experimental song full of drones and sweeps that sound very mechanical (not that that is a bad thing, it is "The Machine," right? ). This track features some of Waters' anti-establishment, anti-greed lyrics (done much better on "Money" and "Pigs"). Although this is experimental, the Floyd experimented a lot better on other albums prior to WYWH, and there isn't much more to say here other than the feel of the song and Wright's keyboard savvy saves it from being a complete wash, but still this one falls short when compared to earlier experimental tracks and later keyboard/synth efforts by Wright (such as "Dogs" or "Sheep").

HAVE A CIGAR : What you have here is Pink Floyd's standard funk-blues track (åla "Childhood's End". "Time" and later "What Do You Want From Me?" and done much better with "Time" and "Pigs"). Although the legendary Roy Harper sings the lyrics, and the way the lyrics attach to the meter make it a very cool song - one of my favorites - it is still just a very mediocre Floyd song in comparison to a few of the aforementioned "funk-blues" tracks. Still, this track is one of the saviors of the album, for sure.

WISH YOU WERE HERE : Ah ? here we come to the old campfire sing-a-long favorite acoustic "Kumbaya" pop song that seems to be a karaoke favorite of all the drunks at a party, or the one song every amateur guitarist starts playing to get everyone to acknowledge he knows about Pink Floyd. Skip to the next track, please. To me, WYWH is not even their best acoustic song. It is boring, weak and way overrated - a hat-grabber for me.

SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND VI-IX : The best part of the entire album and by far the most interesting. This piece takes the lush soundscape of Part 1-5 and every positive thing about the first part and develops it even further. It is darker, seems to give us a vision of what is to come with "Sheep" and parts of "The Wall", but even features elements of funk and there is one part that sounds almost like The Doors joined in the fray and ends with, what seems to me to be, a nod to "Atom Heart Mother." This is one of Floyd's greatest efforts - classic Floyd and saves the album from being a bit of a clunker.

Overall:

This album has some divine moments, beautiful and haunting elements that evoke a cold nostalgia; it has stand-out tracks like "Shine On" (especially VI-IX) and "Have A Cigar," but the remainder of the album leaves much to be desired. Floyd often said that they were empty creatively after DSOTM and I think it shows here much more than most people would like to admit. 3/5

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