THE WALL

Is "The Wall" a Pink Floyd album or a Roger Waters album?

It started in "Animals", which's well known, but in "The Wall" Roger Waters took the role of the absolute leader of the band and created a strong work which would be loved and hated by Pink Floyd fans because it doesn't sound at all to any of their previous albums, this was almost a Roger Waters' solo album with the collaboration of David Gilmour and Nick Mason, and, oh, yeah, Rick Wright.

The double album is a conceptual opera rock containing 26 short songs and narrating a story about a rock star called Pink and his awful journey through parental orphanhood, drug abuse, wife's infidelity, school mean teacher traumas and a suffocating relationship with his mother and how all of these events locked up the guy into a huge imaginary wall that isolated him from the real world and people.

Unlike how I did with the three previous reviews that I wrote of Pink Floyd, I will not describe this album song by song since it has a lot of them, I'll describe the album in general terms. Yes, I believe the album is a masterpiece and deserves the highest rate on this website, and here is why:

1.- The plot of the album: As I said before, the album narrates and describes through music a lot of awful things happening to one simple person and gives us great interpretations of mental illness as depression and how it can break people into something that no one would like to become to.

2.- The characters: Besides Pink, "The Wall" has a lot of interesting characters that are a crucial part of the story and Roger Waters developed them really well through the album.

3.- The legacy: "The Wall" became one of the most representative albums in Pink Floyd's discography and a lot of interpretations have been made from several artists (including Roger Waters' show in Germany playing it with a lot of well-known musicians of the eighties), the film released in 1982 and of course the fact that Roger Waters has been playing it for more than thirty years filling stadiums all over the world.

4.- The music: Of course, I can't rate a musical album without taking a look at the music: there are no long songs or long instrumental passages, only short songs complementing the soundtrack of a movie that wasn't been released yet but would be. It has slow songs, fast songs, melodic and obscure ones, rocky and drummy ones; it has acoustic arrangements, orchestral arrangements, rock and roll arrangements, instrumental arrangements (just a few); happy songs, sad songs, scary songs; it has babies crying, falling bombs, people shouting, birds singing, walls falling; it has a judge, a mother, a beloved woman; it has drugs, alcohol, sex and depression. Anyway, it has everything.

With this album Pink Floyd closed an era and a decade, it was the last album in which the four classic members of the group were playing and after this nothing was ever the same and it was a majestic way to make that closure, that's for sure.

SONG RATING: In the flesh? 5 The thin ice, 5 Another brick in the wall, 1, 5 The happiest days of our lives, 5 Another brick in the wall, 2, 5 Mother, 5 Goodbye blue sky, 5 Empty spaces, 4 Young lust, 4 One of my turns, 5 Don't leave me now, 5 Another brick in the wall, 3, 4 Goodbye cruel world, 5 Hey you, 5 Is there anybody out there, 4 Nobody home, 5 Vera, 5 Bring the boys back home, 4 Comfortably numb, 5 The show must go on, 4 In the flesh, 4 Run like hell, 5 Waiting for the worms, 5 Stop, 4 The trial, 5 Outside the wall, 4

AVERAGE: 4.65

PERCENTAGE: 93.08

ALBUM RATING: 5 stars

I ranked this album #93 on my TOP 100 favorite Progressive Rock albums of all time.

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