Pink Floyd, The Wall

The decline of the classic lineup started here, along with Roger Waters' terminal ego-driven navel-gazing. It's very difficult to gin up much sympathy for a self-absorbed rocker's unilaterally imposed barrier between him and the world, even if his daddy did die in the war, but minus the wacko fascist flourish the album asks you to treat it as an unalloyed tragedy and it just isn't. Plus, a few shining exceptions like "Comfortably Numb" and maybe "Young Lust" aside, the hulkish pretense of the whole thing means no song stands well on its own (as a single "Another Brick in the Wall Part II" gave schoolkids a great stick to beat their teachers with, but absent its context it's hardly sophisticated criticism). What gets the album past this is its sheer theatricality, one of the few records — let alone double albums — to really meet the concept of "concept," with peerless production values and some genuinely satisfying catharsis. But the rage is too unfocused to be meaningful ("One of My Turns" indeed) no matter how acute, and while your humble jerk critic and every subsequent angsty generation will listen to it for awhile non-stop, eventually you'll grow out of it just like Pink did and I did and Waters didn't. Come for the self-inflicted psychological wounds, stay for the art. The movie (because it was inevitable there'd be one) adds some Final Cut-like linking songs that work well and an excellent extended "Empty Spaces" in the form of "What Shall We Do Now?", though Bob Geldof doesn't really hit Waters' vocal range and the omission of "Hey You" is glaring. Overall the movie version is an improvement, but issuing "When The Tigers Broke Free" as a single had the same issues "ABITW Part II" did, and the soundtrack has yet to appear in its entirety on any re-release even though it's obviously ripe for it. (Content: violent imagery, S-bomb in "Nobody Home" and "The Trial.")

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Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon

There are many reasons this album loomed large for years like the Kubrick monolith over the Billboard charts, and all those explanations suffice, but the biggest is its unfailing consistency. This album radiates quality from every rainbow-tinged and inky black atom, and every member did his part, whether it was Roger Waters' restrained lyrics, David Gilmour's scintillating guitar, Richard Wright's VCS-3 soundscapes or even a rare solo credit for Nick Mason. The songs vary in style but not in theme and flow perfectly from one track to the next, aided greatly by Alan Parsons' unerring engineering and a startling world-building array of overlaid sounds. Heartbeats and helicopters? Check. Inscrutable quotes? Check. Coins and cash registers in 7/4 time? Check and double check. The technique reinforces the music; the music reinforces the concept; the concept reinforces the experience. Rarely are there true artistic unities in pop music, even when pop music was more explicitly artistic, but this album is indisputably one of them. Notwithstanding various later local maxima you might even say they would never eclipse it. Recurrently reissued and remastered, the postcards in the 20th Anniversary version were fun but to my ear James Guthrie's mix for the 30th is the superior release. (Content: a muffled F-bomb in "Speak to Me" and a single S-bomb in "Money.")

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Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here

The band's famous elegy for Syd Barrett, their then-faltering former bandmate, studded with some of Hipgnosis' best photographic work and a slightly harsher edge. Though it is beloved, it is by no means perfect: the sprawling "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" overflows half of the album and practically smothers it, and its meandering feel is something I used to listen to when I was a moody teenager to make me even moodier. Indeed, one of the few good things about A Collection of Great Dance Songs is that they substantially cut this down and merely in doing so made it better at the same time. On the other hand, the other three songs are excellent: the brooding "Welcome to the Machine," full of ominous, unsettling synthesized effects, and the gentle fan favourite title track with David Gilmour's murmuring guitar and that inspired "car radio" introduction. My personal favourite, however, is the slyly arresting "Have a Cigar," atypically featuring guest vocalist Roy Harper, full of cheeky caustic satire, later to be covered by numerous lesser bands unsuccessfully aspiring to that level of tarty wit. Wish You Were Here's elevated ethereal sensibilities make it really the last Floyd album to maintain the fluid ambience and floating mood of their earlier works which would fade as Roger Waters' influence was exerted more strongly. In that sense, it is an elegy for the band's early days as well, their old space-rock roots now fully shed for the tumultuous years that would follow. The "Experience" deluxe reissue includes the unreleased Household Objects demo "Wine Glasses," interesting historically to the completist, but by its nature even less developed than the "Shine On" suite it inspired. (Content: no concerns.)

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Pink Floyd, Relics

Pink Floyd has never done well in compilation form (as proof, see particularly A Collection of Great Dance Songs but also Works) except for their earlier, less conceptually rigourous outings, which is probably why this one succeeds where other such accumulations fail. A strange throwback album from 1971 when EMI was concerned about their apparent lack of studio output, the label collected a few A-sides and B-sides here and there and a couple odds and sods from some of the previous albums and even threw in the unreleased "Biding My Time," a rare studio version from the live favourite "The Man and the Journey" which was never otherwise properly recorded. Even the album art was a motley bunch, officially a Nick Mason doodle of some Rube Goldbergian contraption, but my LP and cassette have a bizarre four-eyed and double-tongued bottle opener which was used States-side. The problem is not the actual songs, which are solid in and of themselves: for example, leading off with "Arnold Layne," their first big single about a cross-dressing underwear thief (!); then later the gauzy, breezy psychedelia of "See Emily Play," their other big early single; and sandwiched between them, three meditative B-sides ranging from the baroque lyricism of "Julia Dream" to the menacing shrieking terror of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" (the original version, later remade for film at least twice). No, the real problem is what EMI left out. I rather like "Remember A Day," but there were better tracks on A Saucerful of Secrets, and no one was desperately asking for cuts from More to round out the second half to replace the A-sides they didn't include like "Point Me At The Sky," "Apples and Oranges" or "It Would Be So Nice" -- all of which are only represented by those aforementioned B-sides. For that matter, "Remember A Day" was itself another B-side b/w, er, a/w "Let There Be More Light," from the same album and also omitted, and I'm not sure what the space-jam instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive" or endearingly daffy "Bike" (both from Piper At The Gates of Dawn) are doing here at all. Still, "Biding My Time"'s studio incarnation is excellent, with its jazzy jam middle intact, and it pretty much redeems the second side all by itself. Overall it's a strange album from a strange time, and by no means a complete portrait of their early work, but because it's so weird it's certainly worth a spin. The CD reissue reverts to the original mono (instead of Duophonic) mixes for "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play," flattening them to my ears even though the inclusion is arguably more authentic, and actually has a photograph of Mason's contraption fully built in miniature which I am told now sits on his desk. (Content: mildly adult themes in "Arnold Layne," implied violence in "Careful With That Axe.")

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Pink Floyd, The Endless River

When Richard Wright died in 2008, the introspective and unique musical fabric of the group personified (see, for example, his work during the band's early days such as on Saucerful of Secrets and Atom Heart Mother), the eulogies of his bandmates and ex-bandmate poured forth as if the heart and soul of the band had passed on and that would be the end of Pink Floyd. Of course, unreleased performances and session recordings have ways of raising the departed, and on modern equipment even noodling and idle jams can gain full flesh after the fact. I'm not sure if another album was needed after 1994's The Division Bell, particularly given the David Gilmour-led incarnation's tendency to unfocused auditory textures and vapid lyrics, but I'm pretty sure it's not this one. It's competent, there's no doubt; we would have expected no less from the inveterate musical aesthete he is, notable in its technical excellence and scrupulous internal consistency. However, it's also in some ways an unimaginative summary document of every Floyd album that's gone before, popped into a computer given orders to incorporate this material from this session and that to make it appropriately "Floydian," which is why you hear bits of "Run Like Hell" in "Allons-y (1)" and snatches of "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party" in "Skins" (snicker) and "Terminal Frost" in "Anisina" (a particularly nice piece, I must admit, especially with those crazy wind instruments howling along on their separate melodic threads) and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" throughout almost all of the lead tracks on the various "sides." In fact, the whole album is a great big "Wish You Were Here" for Wright just as the original was for Syd Barrett, but compared to its spiritual ancestor it suffers for being derivative and forced, and long on elegy and short on meat. Wright's solo credited works are slight, being limited to two short tracks remarkable only for their painful brevity and one being named "Autumn '68" (see Atom Heart Mother again), and if the songwriting credits are to be believed he barely features on half the tracks at all. Given his limited output, then, why constrain the entire album to merely post-production odds and ends? The especial low point is an obvious castoff from the "Bell" sessions recycling Stephen Hawking's electronic oration ("Talkin' Hawkin'", egad); he may literally have phoned that in. Gilmour closes the album on its sole vocal track (the decent "Louder Than Words"), a sort of gentle ballad that could have at least broken up the monotony of what preceded it if he'd only written one or two more. Currently, he's on record as saying this will be the final Pink Floyd album but as a long-time fan of the band I kind of doubt it and I certainly hope against it. This is not the note I'd go out on, nor do I believe Richard Wright would have wanted to either. The deluxe box adds a few more tracks on Blu-ray, including some additional Wright compositions, but is mostly intended as a video source; the high fidelity and additional material still don't counter the main album's fundamental imbalances. (Content: a single mild expletive.)

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Pink Floyd, A Collection Of Great Dance Songs

This ill-conceived compilation gets its two stars entirely from the amusingly facetious title and another inspired Hipgnosis album cover with the dancers guyed to the ground so tautly their tango is frozen for all eternity. Otherwise, the album itself is nearly completely forgettable. If Pink Floyd made singles (that didn't suck), this kind of shovel instant-The-Nice-Price album might work, but instead it's an exercise in "sounded like a good idea at the time" and "let's get another dollar from the punters" by hacking out, like a rusty machete to an orchid, ragged slices from their grander albums that lack the context and structure essential to their proper appreciation. "Sheep," by itself, is just Roger Waters screaming about a hapless flock of Merinos, not obviously an exhortation to the fearful proletariat to rise up, and why was "Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)" a single when, without the harrowing childhood of young Pink to draw on, the song can only be interpreted as a blunt smear against intellectualism? In fairness, this is not totally true for the other tracks, per se, but they suffer for different reasons: "One of These Days'" snarling brutality is naked without contrasting against the other intriguing tracks on the underappreciated Meddle, and "Money" becomes a victim of an interlabel dispute where Capitol would permit Columbia to use the original recording of "One of These Days" but not "Money," meaning its reincarnation as an underwhelming David Gilmour solo track (see also About Face), though Dick Parry's saxophone is expertly recreated. Only "Wish You Were Here" can truly stand alone, and the edited "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is much more cohesive, ironically by taking segments off four of the seven sprawling original parts. Worth it to Floyd completists like myself if only for that last, but at least the band recognized the obvious with the title, because on this collection these songs lose their greatness in isolation and you really can't dance to them. (Content: S-bomb, stylized violence.)

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Pink Floyd, Atom Heart Mother

This is the album every Floydian loves to hate. This is the album the band members themselves disowned. But every scorned object of derision has its apologists, and if there's not yet an Atom Heart Mother fan club, then let it begin with me. This was the album in high school that my contemporary Gary described as having "that wacky breakfast song." This was the album I listened to incessantly on vinyl in the university basement while pretending to study. No one, not even your humble jerk critic, will disagree that the title track is a luxuriant exercise in the most pompous sort of art rock; I will even concede that the linking vocal tracks between the two primary instrumental suites are wan and uninspired. But no one else ever made this kind of crap sound good. A true classical composition with a full orchestra, drum beat, guitars and Farfisa organ you could listen to. Actual movements and themes, by G-d, not some atonal meandering tarted-up acid trip. Mannerism for Music! And finishing it up with the most melodic roadie's breakfast you've ever listened to, gulps of tea and crunches of corn flakes and an infinite number of flaring matches opposing a gentle, aspirational three-parter that elevates his banal morning rites into the heavens. Every time I listen to this album I discover some new musical detail I've missed, some little tidbit that makes it all the more rich. The most galling part is that the remaining members of Pink Floyd know exactly what they're missing out on, and they reject it still. (Content: no concerns.)

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Pink Floyd, Animals

If George Orwell had played bass in an English rock band, he'd probably have written this album instead of Animal Farm, but instead we have Roger Waters ripping him off. Pigs, dogs and sheep all, it's the oligarchs versus the proletariat split into three lengthy tracks that the solid prog rock backing somehow avoids making self-indulgent, plus the two bookends serving as prelude, epilogue and afterthought all at the same time. Waters has never shied from wearing his politics on his sleeve, part of what made his later solo output often dreary, but if the album is merely a thinly disguised excuse to bark at the exploitation of the working class and the scheming of puritanical censors (especially "Pigs: Three Different Ones") it mostly manages to avoid beating people over the head with it. David Gilmour is hauntingly soulful and almost sympathetic to the people's erstwhile oppressors in "Dogs," and the sheep ("Sheep") even triumph over them; only "Pigs" gives Waters a bit too much lyrical leeway, though his grinning delivery and the closest thing this album has to a groove save it from breaking down into reverse moralizing. Less gritty than The Final Cut and less narratively constrained than The Wall, Animals is a uniquely transitional album that manages to be relevant and thought-provoking without being painfully transparent or losing sight of its musical goals. (Content: some stylized violent content and an F-bomb.)

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