Having a Pink Floyd weekend

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I'm working this morning but decided last night, after reading their Wiki, to listen to the whole catalog from top to bottom. I already had The Wall in high school, got familiar with Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here mostly through friends, another friend talked me into buying Piper At The Gates of Dawn years ago as well.

Working through Saucer Full of Secrets right now. I'm dabbling with sort of a small summary for myself on what I find, particularly with the albums (like the one just mentioned) that I haven't had as much contact with.

Suppose I'll update this later and let you guys know how far I got through it. I suppose as well it's a good place to just say 'anything Floyd go for it'.

For me what's drawn me to them is the searing altruism, what feels like keen arms-length observation and dethatched empathy, and turns of phrase in the vocals as well as how the instrumental landscapes tie in so beautiful. They're the kind of band where, when you're chewing on deep life issues, you're more likely to visit than your average top 40 group (one could say the same for Tool as well I suppose).

I hope your depression lifts soon

I'd say it's the opposite, this is part of how I beat depression. IMHO depression is misaligned expectations with reality, I enjoy taking these things apart with a screwdriver, seeing how they work, and taking what doesn't work to the curb.

I'm finishing up The Division Bell. The Endless River might have to wait until tomorrow because it's been a full weekend, I'm just about ready for bed, and since its their last album I'd rather give it a hearing when I'm firing on all cylinders.

The winners for me:

Piper
Saucer
Meddle
Dark Side of the Moon
Wish You Were Here
Momentary Laps of Reason
Division Bell

Some takeaways:

Piper at the Gates of Dawn - Listening to it again I couldn't help but think of Klaxon's first album or two and just how much Syd Barrett it sounds like they were going for.

Saucerful of Secrets - I was actually taken back by Saucer, hadn't heard of it before - it's really good. Set Controls for the Heart of the Sun and the title track really stood out for me.

More - It wasn't bad, just more of a movie track than anything.

Ummagumma - Probably my least favorite as 'album', seems more like a promissory note to the fans that they've been in the studio trying new stuff.

Atom Heart Mother - It wasn't terrible, much more musical than Ummagumma, but it's an open question whether I'd go back to it.

Meddle - I liked this one, the middle tracks were a bit like Atom Heart but the opener and closers, One of These Days and Echoes, were really strong and of course I've seen the Live at Pompei they did for Echoes - adds a lot.

Obscured By Clouds - somewhere between Meddle and Atom Heart Mother - not bad but didn't grab me either.

The Dark Side of the Moon - little needs to be said, it's excellent.

Wish You Were Here - I completely forgot just how good Welcome to the Machine is, it took me by surprise all over again!

Animals - I'd never heard it before, felt like half a step backward, like they'd depleted content with the last few albums. Some of it was good, a lot of it was didactic in sort of a flat way.

I actually skipped The Wall because I know it too well and I kinda didn't care to listen to it again.

The Final Cut - This album gets beat up again, it wasn't bad, it was a lot of ballads and the flavor was somewhere between Animals and The Wall. This one could have been taken as politically didactic as well but they did better, went deeper, and told a more thorough story than with Animals.

Momentary Laps of Reason - Very good album, was starting to wonder when I'd hear Learning to Fly. Very 80's vibe but they made it work.

Division Bell - Possibly a bit stronger than Momentary Laps of Reason, I've got maybe 6 minutes left but so far great stuff.

I started listening to The Endless River (2014 - two remaining band members alive, short of Waters who they're still apparently at odds with, David Gilmour was 68 and Nick Mason was 69), ran into the Youtube ads and figured it was just too poignant as their last album to deal with that crap so I ordered it from Amazon and threw it on my headphones. I knew it was a place where, since it was their last, they'd really try to give it their best to go retrospective and pack a life of learned lessons into it.

Good close to their career. Far more instrumental than vocal, which is fine. Great way to blaze off into the sunset. Was it a magnum opus? Nah, I think they already did that a few times, didn't need to do it again. Just need a good right-side book end for their career and I think they did it well.

Dark side of the Moon album , “Time”. , if you can get past the alarm bells segment , and hear the words ,
It can be almost hypnotic .

Both 'Us and Them' and 'Breathe' pack an incredible amount of wisdom. Among many things people these days might accuse Roger Waters of it's not a lack of vision (his written words sung by Gilmore).

Roger Waters did some amazing work even after he left. Pink Floyd, “ amused to death “ album

I'm still circling back through some of the albums, threw on Saucerful of Secrets and More yesterday while I working.

One of my favorite finds on Youtube, which I actually had the fortune of encountering before I even decided to do my Floyd weekend (might have contributed to it - who knows), is the upload of Echoes pts. 1 and 2. Meddle's sort of a strange album in that the middle sounds pretty much like Atom Heart Mother or Obscured by Clouds, it's just the first and last songs that sound seem like forerunners to stuff on Wish You Were Here.

What I really like about Echoes - it's a big concept, it seems to strike an equipoise between their early and mid albums... uggh I feel like Christian Bale in American Psycho talking about Huey Lewis and The News... It's an experience worth having! I'll leave it there.

No roger waters no pink fllyod ......echoes2. Sounded. Kinda Floyd like,but am old school floyd person

I'd just chime in with one small clarifier - Rogers was in from 1965 to 1985. Echoes was on Meddle (1971) and the Pompei video was 1972, so he's in the video - he just let Wright sub in on the vocals for whatever reason.

With Dark Side of the Moon Water's wrote, Gilmour did most of the vocals. With The Wall they switched back and forth more normally. They've always been a multiple vocalist band, maybe with the exception of Piper at the Gates of Dawn which was almost all Syd Barrett.

One of the other things I thought was hilarious, just how much the guys from Klaxons seem to have gone after Syd Barrett's style. Just one of many examples where the comparison jumps out:

A true conessuier of Floyd ........ please excuse my lack of knowledge of the history of this great band.

To be fair I wouldn't claim that - just quicker on the draw with Wikipedia. I actually decided to read their entry top to bottom before I did all this, I knew they had a deep catalog (something like 6 albums from 1967 to 1972 between Piper and Dark Side of the Moon that I had no clue on for the most part). Figured it was good time to dive into the bin after it and see what their evolution as a band looked like.

Point of curiosity here .. concerning the song “time “ As I grew up from a wee lass , music was my obsession , but only certain songs , that I would listen to on repeat for hours at a time , in almost a perfect zen state .
And Time was one of those songs , As was “Ticking away the moments that made up the dull day” in the aspie zone.

My tuning never had quite that fine a point on it. My experience of music, from childhood, it's a bit tricky to explain in clearer terms than this but it's like music with the right characteristics would hint at some sacred / divine object but never quite disclose it, a bit like a glimmer or flash that would catch my attention and I'd have to unpack what it was of value that caught my attention.

To this day I'm quite certain that music itself, even without words, holds certain properties and I've tried to describe set, setting, melodic and dissonance space, mix ratio, etc. as creating a sort of 'prism' where different people can listen to it and visualize different things (their own internal content is thrown against it) but ultimately it seems like the color, bending, or framing tends to be the same. I've also wondered if what makes music relatable or unrelatable is what individual / personal content one has to park in the space of that prism. A good example is with me and dark drum n bass, not many people can relate to it, those who can tend to be really into it, and it seems to have something to do with cognitive mapping.