MEDDLE

Meddle is one of the better Pink Floyd albums in my opinion. The psychedelic style and sound was still very much present on the previous Atom Heart Mother album, but with Meddle they moved away from psychadelia for the first time (only to revert to it on the next album Obscured By Clouds).

The album begins with One Of These Days, a rather hard rocking instrumental. Well, there is actually one vocal line in it that I think is out of place and adds nothing of value. This song is not progressive in my opinion since it is based on one single riff that moves through the whole song. As you probably guessed already, I'm not too impressed with this one.

A Pillow Of Winds is a very nice, folky acoustic song that I find quite enjoyable. However, this is hardly the stuff that will blow the Prog fan away. Fearless has a typical Pink Floyd melody, but untypical of them is that it is acoustically based. San Tropez is a more fun, jazzy song. This song also is acoustically based with acoustic guitars and very jazz grand piano parts. I judge this as a throwaway song, but it doesn't distract from the overall cohesion of the album. Seamus is a pure blues number, also acoustically based. It is an instrumental apart from the addition of a "singing" dog! This addition is the only thing that makes this one stand out.

Echoes is in many ways a very typical 70's Pink Floyd song and clearly a predecessor to Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Echoes takes up the whole second side of the album and I think it is quite a bit too long for its own good. There is a too long experimental part in the middle that just goes nowhere. Still, it is one of the better long Pink Floyd songs of all time.

The strong acoustic leaning they adopted for this album is what makes it stand out from most other Pink Floyd albums in my opinion. However, apart from Echoes the song structures of these songs are conventional. The influences are more varied than usual with Pink Floyd; folk, jazz, blues, but they seem not to be able to fuse these influences together. Therefore the music here is not particularly progressive. Thankfully is it also not very psychedelic, making this album stand out from all previous ones and some latter ones.

Meddle was clearly the best Pink Floyd album since the debut and a large step forward for a band that seemingly lost their direction after Syd Barret left (or became insane or whatever). Dark Side Of The Moon would become their commercial breakthrough but Meddle is more interesting musically. It is, however, very far from being a masterpiece of progressive music.

Good, but hardly essential unless you are a Pink Floyd fan (which I am not very much).