Postby Quaco » 23 Jul 2006, 23:56
It is a testament to the musicality of the sixties and seventies that someone virtually tone deaf like Roger Waters felt he had to write songs with melodies and indeed came up with melodically strong stuff like "Corporal Clegg", "Green Is the Colour", "San Tropez", and even later stuff like "Don't Leave Me Now". For a bunch of architecture students (and a gifted blues guitarist), it's surprising they came up with something like "Echoes", which really is The Beatles ("Across the Universe" specifically) transported to the seventies.
Pink Floyd have already reaped their rewards, so they don't need me to defend them or to speak for them, but on a purely musical level, they were a superior group. There are many aspects of their career that can and probably should be criticized, but their albums up through the end of the seventies were great. Piper is fresh and inventive (geoff, it's odd you would slate it for not being "majestic" as I don't think it was really meant to be, nearly all the songs being single-length); More is warm and druggy and slow yet not overbearing; Animals bites with an intensity you can still feel today.
Whatever one may think of them -- and this takes into account all of one's prejudices, whether those inherited from one's era (e.g., the post-punk/pre-indie belief that PF were overblown prog) or from one's own personal experiences (e.g., an older brother who overplayed PF to death) -- the Floyd's canon offers enough of a complete world -- full of loud and soft, conventional and experimental, emotional and intellectual, melodic and rhythmic -- to justify becoming an all-consuming obsession or to fuel a radio station. One can say that about few artists: The Beatles, Bowie maybe, and who else?
Anyway, my favorites at the moment are...
Album: The More soundtrack. Animals is runner up -- I'm surprised it has retained as much power as it has.
Song: So many ... "Rain in the Country" (Zabriskie Point-era instrumental outtake from Omay Yad bootleg), "Crumbling Land" (also ZP-era), "Green Is the Colour" (studio and BBC versions), "See-Saw", "The Scarecrow", "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party" (which would have made a great kung-fu movie soundtrack), "Dogs", and "Absolutely Curtains".
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