do you like the "dark side" of the discography?

Big Ears wrote: Phil Collins was a good drummer with Genesis, but I do not want to hear his solo work or the albums he produced for Eric Clapton.

Those albums with Eric Clapton are a load of fun. IT'S - IN - THE - WAY - THAT - YOU - USE - IT! Phil Collins incredible drumming dominates the albums and you don't even remember clapton's parts. I remember one critic calls Collins drumming a "whomping technique." Very true, I love it. Drums should sound like explosions, that's what the drum gods intended.

TODDLER wrote: One reason I do recall: People who bought the album upon the week of it's release, complained that it was too much like a Roger Waters album. I only heard the album once. That was the headline news for awhile. The whole entire attitude amongst Pink Floyd fans ...they disagreed with the music and the album developed a bad reputation. Waters had taken over the band and hardcore fans took it a bit too seriously. It wasn't an extreme situation where someone shoots "Dimebag" for changing his direction, but more ...an abundance of snooty attitudes in the Floyd fans. This is all true and it happened a long time ago.

Ironically Roger Waters had never released a regular solo album up until the point of Final Cut, so it should have been difficult to tell what a Roger Waters solo album sounded like.

Pros and Cons, the closest album to Final Cut, is still very different in style (much less Floydian), and the next two albums he released were even more different.

Final Cut is much much closer to, say, the Wall, then it is to any Roger Waters solo album.

The problem people had with Final Cut is that it is a lot less pop/rocky then previous Floyd. It is darker and more cerebral. It is not accessible, nor does it get into audiophile-friendly grooves like earlier Floyd music. Hence it seemed like a stale exercise to people who weren't paying attention to the message and concept.

moshkito wrote: Alitare wrote:  ... I actually like The Final Cut more than the Wall. Neither of these are my favorite Pink Floyd album, though. But hell, I like The Final Cut more than Animals (by a very small point!)   You do know that with the exception of two cuts, the whole of "The Final Cut" was originally a part of the longer and uncut version of The Wall ... right?   Take out "Not Now John" and one other cut, and see the rest of it fit in the story  of The Wall!

I always dug Nektar's Magic is A Child and plenty of their other later albums, despite them not being the ballsy acid trips of their earlier stuff. They're more like The Doobies if they had done a ton of unusually potent doobage in the studio and writing process.

Dayvenkirq wrote: TODDLER wrote: One reason I do recall: People who bought the album upon the week of it's release, complained that it was too much like a Roger Waters album. That's funny. The Wall is mostly a Waters album. Did they know that? If yes, what did they think of that?

Edited by TODDLER - May 02 2012 at 09:40

I guess I'm going to be the only one to confess a love of Gentle Giant's Civilian...

mjf85maf wrote: I guess I'm going to be the only one to confess a love of Gentle Giant's Civilian...

I happen to be listening to it right now. I think I gave it a 3 star rating when I reviewed it here back in the mid 16th century. I don't think GG ever released a dud. The band wasn't pleased with it especially Minnear although Weathers liked it as far as I can remember back in '80. But they moved on when it was time to move on. Derek Schulman even signed Slipknot and Nickelback  when he became president of Roadrunner Records. I dunno I have no problems with any GG album. At least he didn't sign Céline.


Edited by Vibrationbaby - May 02 2012 at 14:06

I think prog general opinion can get a bit mired in formalism.... hence the attitudes towards APP and the Final Cut. There's some deeper stuff there then just the structure of the music. Also why I don't understand a lot of the newer "prog bands," who are almost exclusively formalistic purveyors of prog music. Yet another highlight of the problem is the attitude that lyrics and themes don't matter, or the former is just another instrument. Scary. This is mainly Prog's own fault for dropping the ball on this important part of music, but Pink Floyd in its classic years especially and bands like the APP are not to blame as much, whereas bands like Yes and Genesis tended to take the easy way out. This gave Prog music a certain aimlessness. The very meaningful bands tended to stick closer to classic rock out of deference to its greater track record, but this all fell apart in the 80s anyway, and had been long in decline in the 70s. Think the Who, their music is a lot deeper than just thunderous bass, windmills, crashing drums... etc. There is a reason they stayed with a mix of prog and classic rock and didn't move into symphonic, and that is so they could deliver their message more effectively. That is a different kind of prog approach, that is more about content and aims of the music and less about how it is structured.  





 

Vibrationbaby wrote: lazland wrote: TODDLER wrote: Dayvenkirq wrote: TODDLER wrote: One reason I do recall: People who bought the album upon the week of it's release, complained that it was too much like a Roger Waters album. That's funny. The Wall is mostly a Waters album. Did they know that? If yes, what did they think of that?   I remember buying the Wall the first week it was available in stores. Everyone around me was taking about the album and everyone was discussing the tour that was about to begin (I think) and it just seems that most people then...associated the name Pink Floyd with the Wall and the stage show itself.. I don't know what went wrong with people around me or why many of them were disgusted with Final Cut? All I recall were people thinking that Waters was taking over the band and they thought he was egocentric. It doesn't make sense because as you say..the Wall was more of Waters taking. The Wall still had a measure of collaboration, including (from memory) three co-written tracks with Gilmour. Plus the fact that their financial situation had gone tits up with the crash of their investments through dirty deeds meant that they absolutely had to have a success as Floyd. The Final Cut was, effectively, a Waters solo album made with the rather unhappy playing of Gilmour & Mason. All admitted it at the time. Oh, and we all said Waters was an ego maniac at the time, because it was true. I say that as a huge admirer, BTW. Vee all know it vas a Roger von Vaters solo musik rekord. I sink that zis is a gut musik. Gilmour has a couple of good solos. When I listen to it I just go for the Gilmour solos and his vocals on Not Now John ( arguably the best track on the album ) rather than wade through Roger's whining Jesus Jesus what's it all about drivel. I

Dellinger wrote: I wouldn't say prog artists dismissed the importance of lirycs, or that they tried to find the easy way out. The easy way out would be more lirycs about boy meets girl, brokenhearts, having fun, etc, which lot's of pop and rock bands did. Prog artists at least used to stay out of such matters. Perhaps many of them weren't the best liryc writers, but they certainly did not try to find the easy way out.

The easy way out among talented and generally ambitious musicians (which the pop-rockers are only to a degree) is creating music from jams and attaching lyrics about fantasy and empty mysticism, they are merely attached with no great consideration, there is no theme and attitude that is being built on, or it is confused and unfocused. This makes the music a little aimless even if it is very very good. This is the easy way out for talented musicians who do not want to commit to making artistic statements in three dimensions. They try to let the music for music's sake talk for itself, but it often only does so to a certain extent. This is one reason why some saw Prog as pretentious (although there are many other and contradictory reasons). It's ambition lacked some dimension. Artists who had something to say in the other dimensions tended to construct their music differently, a subtle difference, but nevertheless.

One example in the same band is Emerson Lake Palmer, with its vapid heyday orgies of symphonic prog compared to its later song Paper Blood, clearly constructed on the lyric and theme (and is clearly more classic rock than symphonic) and which has a brilliant message. You can do both, but it takes more exertion of different parts of the brain, besides the outright musical in some cases. Look how Dylan retreated into better produced and harder rocking music as he had less to say and periodically became more stripped down when he thought of some stuff to say.

Ideally, you should be able to pull a Yes and still be able to sort out the intellectual problems and experiences of which rock as a long type of album narrative music has one of the best abilities to express among art forms - far better than most art forms for sure, perhaps only less than film. To me, it is clear that Waters and co. were geniuses at achieving this, even if their structures sometimes were not quite as compelling as they could be, like with his solo albums, or quite subtle, like with the Final Cut, which has a lot of suspense.


Edited by RoyFairbank - May 02 2012 at 19:53