THE WALL

The Wall Gets 4 Stars. I really like the Wall, it's a great album. But it's definitely not their best. In my opinion, most of Pink Floyd actually gets 5 stars, but the wall is one of their not as good albums. I know it's the most commerically popular because it's played on the radio, and it has that song Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 (No, it's not called We Don't Need No Education!)

I began to realize a decline in creative diversity after Wish You Were Here, with Animals. Animals was still great but there was something about it... it seemed that it was more for the lyrics and less ambient and diverse than previous things like Echoes and Shine on You crazy Diamond. Animals is still a great album and so is the wall, but this feeling I got with Animals became prevalent in the Wall and I knew what was happening. Roger Waters was beginning to take over most of the writing. When I look at all my favourite Pink Floyd songs, Interstellar Overdrive, Careful with that Axe, Eugene, A Saucerful of Secrets, Atom Heart Mother, Echoes, Shine on You crazy Diamond, Dark Side of the Moon, etc, I see a pattern in that most of those songs are written by the band working collectively in the group. But during the Wall Roger had his dominance over the band, and much of that old ambient artistic style of the music had faded. To make up for that, the lyrical style of the album sky rocketed in Creativity, obviously because the wall is a Rock Opera, telling a story concept across all of the songs. And the story is very enigmatic and cool to hear. But the music continued to lack that great creativity of the old stuff. The wall does have progressive moments, but when compared to songs like Echoes, The Wall is almost totally mainstream. I would say that the wall is good for a rocker who recently discovered he might be into the more progressive stuff like Yes and all that. Buy the Wall, it's a good standard for Pink Floyd, and then if you like it, see if you can handle the earlier stuff.

The band were having some problems while recording, particularly with each other and many things happened including Richard Wright being fired.

The Wall is a great and wonderful album. I recommend it to any progressive rock person... it's one of the essential albums. But in my personal opinion, Pink Floyd has done way better than this in the past, and will do way better with their last album, The Division Bell