PINK FLOYD

This is under-estimated masterpiece. Orchestral parts forced to work together as slave labor to Pink Floyd's band members (except Nick, he gets sunshine most of the time). Of course, in this case, when counting out Mason, it's Gilmour who's most prominent, but that's standard situation here, so no raised eyebrows this time. First epic, or if you want, suite. I first heard it about six years ago, when my father was (intentionally) presenting me Pink Floyd's music. I remember two things: I didn't like it much and second one: it was ancient Roman like (these trumpets), it reminded me something like Quo Vadis, or simply these old Rome films. I've returned to this album again when I saw one certain thread about epics. Someone (thanks) said that AHM is in fact first epic. So I took this as a little push-forward and tried it.

5(-), I don't regret. It's one of these albums where you can enjoy every part of it and you're still smiling wide. So high rating because it's Pink Floyd = guarantee of quality. And so it works, it's a very good one. I've said it, I've said it.

And this epic alone will determine my ultimate score for the larger part. Because it's so significant and essential in prog history. I mean, this is 1970 and to produce something like this at this moment in time is really a breakthrough and a milestone in progressive rock. Same as KC's debut also here I have ultimate respect for what is achieved with this track and album.

The b-side contains a couple of short songs and a mini epic to conclude with. If is a pretty ballad and quite famous of course. Nothing psychedelic here. Summer '68 is also fairly normal and quiet with dominant piano. Fat Old Sun is third in a row in this more or less same style. This time guitars accompany the restrained vocals.

Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast is a very interesting mini epic. In fact this is one of my earlier prog experiences as I bought the vinyl in the early eighties and after more than a quarter of a century (I just bought the disc and my pick up doesn't work anymore for a long time) I still remember the typical breakfast sounds in the song. Funny that this is actually the moment I remember most of the entire song. The rest is less psychedelic than the large epic I believe but all in all not as attractive if I may say so. Still very intriguing and original.

Leaves me the task to rate this album. It's not a masterpiece for me since it's too far from perfect. But rating it with three stars would be selling it short big time. So that leaves 4 stars as only possibility mainly due to great significance for prog history and also to sheer greatness. After Animals and WywH this is my most favourite PF album.

Good music, not essential release (it's just a single after all).

4(-) perhaps. Let's be fair. Even three plus would be maybe more sufficient. However, because of mentioned repeats on gigs, this is quite well known album, just another reason to give more.

So what to say about actual music ? That everything fits (PF's stereotype), it has original ideas (you can find them on most of PF's albums), dark lyrics (another cliché of PF), possible Waters influence (even we'll never find out exact percentage of his reign), long concept-like tracks (well, haven't you heard this one before ?) and some other factors that makes successful Pink Floyd music. I've waited, waited and was rewarded by "Shine" main theme, if we can use this term. Welcome's weirdness and interesting last 50 seconds. Yes, these "sounds" can be considered as interesting, as we're somehow released from dark satanic magic ritual music that can cause severe mental problems on more labile individuals. Let's have a cigarette, oh, I mean cigar is somehow flagship of their, even sometimes repeating itself (which annoys a little bit). Nicely transits into Wish You Were Here, I don't have to talk about this one, do I ? It's beautiful in a more ways than just one, even fails on prog side. In this case, and I'm saying it for the first time in my life, "To the hell with prog for this time". Don't quote me here (I know you will anyway). I can just recommend youtube video with changing pictures to this song, it's nice piece of work. And last track, together with first one makes solid piece. When you shut down your brain during "empty" scenes (because they're sparse - I mean beginning's wind for example), you get strong body of music that lives, very persuasively to be honest.

5(-), But I don't care about repeating of schemes. Because ideas are new, music is great and pompously big (you can feel how full the music is) and it all works perfectly, so no one gets hurt, everyone's happy, we are live happily ever after and the work is done. Interesting enough to note, wikipedia provides very detail info on whole album and Shine track (different layers, where stats what etc).

minus point because of "emptty" parts that works far worse than in case of "Echoes" song.

1)ranging from psychedelic roots, typical "stoned" track, works greatly for example on Live in Pompeii, but here too, simply not as much.

2)Nice guitar work on rather "mundane" song than some weird exploration, even the sound isn't usual (disharmony in harmony I would say)

3)Football chanting with cleverly combined repeated guitar riff (you know which one) and some nice brickwork (what?). A song with phases of slow and even slower pace.

4)With Roger Waters beautiful voice (which really fits here, does not sound like squeaky floor like usual) with jazz nostalgia longing, Marty says just: Oh yeah.

5)So, what do you want to hear, it's a blues song, ain't it ? However, dog's growling isn't annoying for me (I can imagine animal lovers and sensitive, or simply people with certain standards to be annoyed) and adds something more to this otherwise "normal" song.

6)Well, here we are talking about one of the first prog epics, aren't we ? Simply wonderful, beautiful, full of imagination, harmonic (virtually everything fits in the right place and over the years, I developed sense of liking "the middle piece"). Lyrics are monster. They're mostly nonsense as far as I understand whole sense of this song (and this is not like other epics, where it's more songs altogether, joined only by clever transitions, here it really works as one big track - yes, there are parts, but all about one thing, all in similar style and you can imagine how they work together, what's their purpose). Very interesting concept and again, works perfectly In Pompeii (everything is simply better there, it's like paradise, except it's burned place). Imitating raven's (and other birds perhaps) on synths is nice piece of work from Mr. Wright.

5(-), because of some less prog songs (you know), but it doesn't matter much.

"Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air"

In the end the album is average, a less complex work by Pink Floyd, than the usual, anyhow inspired, with highs and lows, suffering from the approximate production level and by being blown away by their next release: nothing less that "Dark Side Of The Moon".

Song writing : 4 stars

Production: 2 stars

Results 3 stars.

1) the song writing is simply Floyd at their best: the four individuals are collaborating, so there is an undeniable equilibrium that gives strenght to it.

2) The arrangements are innovatives, they own a lot to PF previous albums, especially Meddle, but however they are enriched by the live rehersal of the whole project they had done back in 1972, when they played it in front of the audience (the piece was still called "Eclipse- a piece for assorted lunatics").

3) The production level is simply STUNNING, it sounds like if it had been recorded yesterday. Apart from these considerations the song flux is perfect, everything is in the right place.

It is an incredibly solid and flawless dark work which deals with negative aspects of human life, which potentially push people to get mad : time, money, carelessness for other persons, greed, fear etc... in the proposition of these themes the work is always pervaded by a deep sense of drama and it's really theatrical.

What makes a Shakespeare's piece actual? The choice of themes which are already intrinsically eternal : a troubled love (Romeo and Juliet) jealousy (Othello) and so on; this peculiarity can be found also on "Dark side of the Moon". What probably makes this record immortal and so adored by people is also the unique atmosphere that it creates, thanks to its numerous changes of moods, right from the first heartbeat to the last notes of the majestic closing track "Eclipse"; The sound of the band is ethereal, surreal, visionary, elegant, psychedelic yet jazzy in some bits..incredible.

Timeless, a milestone in rock history and one of the most important art statement of the 20th century.

Let There Be More Light - You have to take a step back on excavating this gaudy fossil after so many years to appreciate just how resilient early Floyd DNA truly was. Water's elastic and circular bass riff which allows Wright's overlying implied organ harmonies to move neurotically around it has been borrowed by everyone and their dog ever since. Similarly that particularly Floydian take on oriental tonality and eastern inflected phrasing, has come to represent our idea in the west of what Indian classical music might actually sound like. (It doesn't but that's not the point, ethnic forgeries fetch more than the originals in this marketplace) The lulling and sensual derangement of Barrett is never far from the surface and as to what his practical contribution to the album may or may not have been, his spirit nevertheless permeates every track here.

Remember a Day - Floyd revisit the softer poppier psychedelia of Piper on a song worthy of anything of a similar hue contained on the latter. They splice together very appropriately the childlike and the sinister elements that coexisted so effortlessly in Syd's oeuvre.

Why can't we stay that way ?, climb your favourite apple tree Try to catch the sun,hide from your little brother's gun Dream Yourself away, why can't we reach the sun ? why can't we blow the years away ?

A song so dreamily trippy that every copy of Saucerful should have shipped with a complimentary set of finger cymbals.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun - Notwithstanding the hedonistic spacey abandon that this track celebrates, there is a nihilistic darkness at the heart of the Floyd critter as evidenced by the title and a somewhat ambiguous lyric:

Who is the man who arrives at the wall ? making the shape of his questions at asking Thinking the sun will fall in the evening, will he remember the lesson of giving ?

Waters clearly believes that the eternal cycle of sun nourished life would be much better off without the meddlesome questioning of any kind of sentient middleman.

Had Apocalypse Now had a European director and been set in the failing British Empire of India, you have in your paws a much better soundtrack than the otherwise excellent one provided by the Doors.(and arguably more consistent with the spirit of Joseph Conrad's novel on which Coppola's movie is based)

Corporal Clegg - The best song John Lennon didn't write. Surface amusing but thick with irony and a snarling critique of the exploitation of war heroes who lay their lives and mental health on the line for a patriotic idealism not shared by their lords and masters. Almost a sister song companion to I Am the Walrus:

He's never been the same, no-one is to blame Mrs Clegg you must be proud of him, Mrs Clegg another drop of gin ?

Like so many innovative facets of this album, it is all too easy to forget that caustically bitter triumphant fanfares had their painful birth throes here. Ditto for the cackling distortion applied to the vocal to imbue same with an unnerving menace. If you wish some sort of litmus test for true originality, you might be well served to start with artists like these, who invented clichés.

A Saucerful of Secrets - Pink Floyd at their least cuddly i.e. a glacially drawn out and heavily padded exercise in how to fill space with yet more space. Perhaps even more tiresome than Interstellar Overdrive as this is shorn of even the mitigating uber riff of the former. Perfect opportunity to get some finger cymbal practice in though. Things do perk up significantly after 4 minutes (or has it been days ?) with a rippling tom groove from Mason over which the BBC Radiophonic Workshop get to earn royalties for their vast but hitherto untapped library of Weird Random Shit Volumes 1 through 57. The emptiness is now full to overflowing. Circa nine minutes you will be rewarded for your industrial strength patience with a deliciously ethereal organ chord sequence that simply blows the likes of the heavily saturated 'Margarine' Dream out of the flotation tank.

See Saw - Mercifully, a welcome return to economy and melodic intent albeit on a rather convoluted 'Syd by Numbers' appropriation which proves if nothing else that Barrett's apparently whimsical creations had an unforgiving internal logic that his imitator's and wannabes sorely lack. It might just be me but I always detect a whiff of incest on this cryptic tale of a brother and sister ?

Another time another day she'll be selling plastic flowers on a Sunday afternoon Picking up weeds she hasn't got the time to care all can see he's not there She grows up for another man and he's down.

Jugband Blues - Heart rending that it had come to this. A very fine and memorable song but one I find hard to listen to without being saddened by the demise it precipitated in its author. Perhaps this represents Syd's first disoriented steps beyond the cusp of 'wholeness' on a composition that you could be forgiven for thinking is the product of a bicameral mind. It's doubtful if Syd would even have remembered writing, performing or recording this number.

And I'm wondering who could be writing this song I don't care if the sun don't shine and I don't care if nothing is mine and I don't care if I'm nervous with you I'll do my loving in the winter and the sea isn't green and I love the queen and what exactly is a dream ? and what exactly is a joke ?

Despite the inexorable advance of Syd's deteriorating mental condition, he continued to be able to produce work that carries the indelible mark of true greatness on two solo albums before the muse, without turning its back, left silently and forever leaving the piper alone at the gates of delirium.

From this point onwards, Floyd's output was of very little interest to me. I don't consider what followed any less accomplished than the first two albums but for this rodent, Pink Floyd were a brilliant pop group with a song-writing genius on board. Once the latter had disembarked that vessel at the behest of a mutinous crew, they became just an incredibly talented and innovative rock band. Greedy ? Not me.