Pink Floyd (Official Thread)

[Musikwala]

It must be wonderful to discover Floyd for the first time, Shackles!

As for Meddle vs. Animals... I'm really not sure but I think Meddle wins ever so slightly. I always preferred the dreamy and soothing Gilmour tracks to the biting vitriol and sarcasm of Waters. That said, Dogs is a fantastic track on Animals. One of their very best! And Sheep is also up there!

 

[LG]

I've listened to Echoes and One of These Days in the past and I thought they were great. And is Animals really just that? I guess it can wait. Any other album I should buy soon?

And Grendel, I've read that the old pressings of Animals sound thin. I should put this out there, I'm a bit of a quality whore!

You are a recent arrival so you haven't read my numerous dissertations about the quality of recordings both old and new Shackles, suffice it to say quality does matter to me.

I only have the 2nd pressing of Animals on CD, not the original. The thing is in many cases the original CD's are considered to be the closest to the analog tape versions before all the tinkering took place later on. The labels were using the 'remastered' tag to sell more product and although there are undoubtedly some very good quality remasters available there are also some terrible ones.

 

[Shackles]

It's funny how I was always aware of the band and some of their '70s hits but never really listened to them until now.

I guess I'm going for Meddle.

 

[Musikwala]

I have been listening to Obscured By Clouds over the last day or so. It is quite a mellow, chilled-out album but the songs are just not there sometimes.

The first 2 instrumentals are pretty cool but they are not very substantial, both together totalling to about 5 min.

Burning Bridges is very nice and dreamy and is reminiscent of the previous album's A Pillow Of Winds, only not as good. Similarly, Mudmen... which follows a similar chord progression as Bridges, is quite good also in a typical Gilmour sort of way.

Free Four is probably one of the best songs here. At least it feels like it has some meat in it. The Gold It's In The... is pleasant enough but again feels a little insubstantial. Wots Uh The Deal is nice.

Childhood's End is okay but I've never been a huge fan of this track. It is like an inferior version of "Time".

Stay is okay... again not much substance to it. This is the running complaint for me regarding this album. Absolutely Curtains is............... lol, experimentation for the sake of it?

Overall, the album's a mixed bag. Wonder how the movie is. Anyone here seen it? An arty French movie with a lot of nudity?

 

[Jonny Come Lately]

Never seen the film myself, and certainly would never have even heard it were it not for Pink Floyd, same with 'More' really.

Funnily enough I was listening to The Gold It's In The... and Wot's Uh The Deal this morning, I think the latter is a very good track - I love the combination of Gilmour and Wright's vocals (although it's a very different song, this aspect does remind me of Echoes and Us And Them). I also like The Gold It's In The..., there's some pretty good guitar work there, although I agree it's not especially deep.

I have to say I do think it sometimes sounds weird when Pink Floyd go for a mellow stripped back sound myself, I don't include songs like Wish You Were Here, Fearless or Goodbye Blue Sky in this, they may be musically lighter than other songs on those albums but they're still recognisable as Floyd. By contrast I remember when I first heard Meddle I was actually quite shocked by the sound of San Tropez and its lack of irony (Seamus is also non-Floyd sounding but as it was clearly a novelty song it seemed less weird to me).

 

[TheSound]

I always quite like 'More' - has a nice folksy feel to it in parts, and at least half of it is purely instrumental which also appeals to me, there can't have been a more 'cinematic' sounding band ever than Floyd, And it's a cohesive work and so makes a lot more sense musically than that 'Zabriskie Point' movie soundtrack they also contributed to, which to me is a real mess, but then that whole 'Z P' movie I must have tried watching 3 or 4 times over the years, and I still have no clue what's going on.

 

[AboutAGirl]

I wish bands still did film soundtracks like that. I think it's a very interesting opportunity to stretch a band's abilities and see what they're made of.

'Cymbeline' I think is a hauntingly beautiful song. And of course 'The Nile Song' and 'Ibiza Bar' represent Floyd at its heaviest. Probably the first grunge songs ever made!

Speaking of Floydian acoustic material... I always thought Floyd should have done an Unplugged. Particularly in the mid-90s when Floyd was very active with Division Bell and the big tours. That happens to be the exact same time that Unplugged was really hot and you had Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Kiss all doing Unplugged.

For a band with such an abundance of clips, effects, and studio tricks, yet with such a spectacular and undeniable level of raw talent, I think it would have been a unique majesty and a true testament to their versatility for them to do a nice stark Unplugged, just a handful of guys on stage with acoustic instruments seeing what they can do. That's probably #1 on my list of concerts I wish would have happened,

PF cover band The Machine released an Unplugged record but it was unfortunately very middling -- mostly Syd Barrett songs and doesn't feel at all like a Pink Floyd show.

 

[Musikwala]

'More' is also a mixed bag for me. But I really like Cirrus Minor, Cymbaline, Nile Song and a couple of others I cannot think of right now.

Cirrus Minor is in my opinion one of their greatest ever!! A song that makes you feel like you are on drugs without actually doing them.

 

[architect]

Obscured by Clouds has always been a favorite of mine. Not a typical Floyd album for sure. Standouts for me are Mudmen, Wot's ....Uh The Deal, Childhoods End, and Stay.

It was a hastily recorded album sandwiched between Meddle and Dark Side,
where they basically watched the film and in 2 weeks wrote and recorded all the songs. In between those 2 weeks was a tour of Japan.

What's interesting to me though is that they did play some of the album live for a while on early Dark Side shows. There are Excellent live versions of Obscured By Clouds, When You're In and Childhoods End.

As they did with most songs they played live, they turned them into fantastic jams!

 

[Johnny-Too-Good]

The Floyd were being called on frequently in the late '60s/early '70s for film score stuff. A lot of it never saw the light of day, but some of the tracks they worked on for the films were improvised and ended up on DSOTM.