WISH YOU WERE HERE

In early 1975,Pink Floyd carried the weight of the world in their shoulders.Following the massive success of their modern masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon,the band had acquired a bitter and hateful feeling of desilusion towards the music industry,and now found themselves before the extreme chalenge of creating a follow up to their 1973 magnum opus.

The result was finnaly revealed by the end of that year-an album light years alway from Dark Side.If the latter(in spite of it's name)spoke directly to one's mind and heart in a clearly brilliant and dramatic presentation,Wish You Were Here leaves a bittersweet feeling of confusion.It's glacial sounding(with a brief relief in the title track)may certanily scare some listeners.Instead of the female choruses,rich studio polishment and epic pieces of the previous work,this album is always very distant and disturbing.In the end,though,it speaks as deep in one's soul as did it's predecessor-it may take a very long time for that to be understood,but, from the first listen,it's impossible to stay indiferent towards the depressive atmosphere of this work.

The suit which opens and closes the album(named in a somewhat naive fashion), Shine On You Crazy Diamond,was surprisingly embraced as one of Floyd's ultimate masterpieces.It is a tribute to the band's former leader and genious,Syd Barret,but it's dark sounding sets the tone of the album from the word go.David Gilmour's four-note introduction,in particular,sticks in one's mind as a sinister overture which endures until the music fade out of the speakers.

The album has several moments of cheer muscial brilliance-as in the funky track Have a Cigar(a hilarious attack towards the musical business),or in the synthesysed jam in the last minutes of the final track.But everything here sounds very empty,very distant-and at first may come as a boring collection of studio devices pulled together and mixed in a record.That's why the title track is the one element that places this album in the olympus of rock music-it's exagerated(if placed out of context)melodic outbreak comes as such a stunning relief in the B side,that it is impossible not to be thrilled by it.It sounds as if the band is finnaly able weep their hard feelings after holding them for so long in the first mechanical half of the album.Simply amazing.

From here on,the band would just get colder and colder-their music suddenly started to reflect their inner conlficts(inexistent or very unexpressive by the time of Dark Side of the Moon).Pink Floyd would move to the next stage of their career-that of subtle political and social contestation(in which Roger Waters was the driving force).The perfect balance of their music,however,was last heard in this deeply disturbing and brilliant piece of work.