MEDDLE

How I wish this were a 5-star album! "Echoes" and "One of These Days" are simply sublime, and due to those two songs, belong in every Floyd fan's collection. However, the other songs, while pleasant, simply don't measure up to those masterpieces.

Beginning with DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, the band became perfectionists and began making ALBUMS rather than collections of songs. I suppose this album was necessary in this evolution of the band, but how I wish they had sat on the album a little longer and recorded other songs that perhaps could have measured up to the other two songs. For example, the band's live versions of "Embryo" and "Cymbaline" were on par with "Echoes," also experimenting with long synth passages and sound effects. As much as I love the short version of "Embryo" found on WORKS (it's really a highly under-rated song in my opinion), it seems to me a studio version of the longer version the band was performing would have sat perfectly beside "Echoes" and "One of These Days," and made this album a true masterpiece.