What was Pink Floyd’s best album?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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The Wall
Dark Side of the Moon
Ditto.
Yep, I’d rate those as my top two as well. Disclaimer: I haven’t listened to the whole Pink Floyd discography.
For sheer scope of vision (musical and thematic), The Wall, though it’s hard to argue against Dark Side. Wish You Were Here and Animals are also pretty underrated, and while I’m not wild about side one of Meddle, “Echoes” is astounding.
Well, Penn State lost.
Yeah, but Nebraska fell 177 short. 🙂
The Wall is a bloated mess. Animals or Dark Side would be my pick.
They should have released two albums.
First, before the movie came out, a rock and roll album titled “The Wall,” with 10-12 actual, complete songs (as opposed to just bits of a score).
And then, when the movie came out, release the soundtrack to the movie as a different album.
Commercially and artistically, it would have been better.
Actually, they did that (with the exception of the 10-12 song limit), though Wikipedia’s discography doesn’t seem to reflect that. There were two Wall albums: “The Wall” and “The Wall Motion Picture Soundtrack” (or something like that).
The movie soundtrack contained some material that wasn’t on the original album, like “When The Tigers Broke Free” (from the beginning of the movie when Pink finds his fathers military stuff) and an expanded version of “Empty Spaces.”
As interesting as the early, Syd Barrett stuff is, and even through Meddle, those can’t be considered among their best, nor can the post-Wall era for the group or the individuals.
So that leaves 4 albums, and of those I’d pick Dark Side. Equal to Animals in terms of Water’s lyric quality and Gilmour’s guitar work, and almost as good as The Wall in terms of overall production despite working with a much smaller budget and much lesser studio equipment. As fun as The Wall was when it came out (and my friends and I listened to it nearly every night for 6 months after work in altered states), it isn’t as consistently strong song-for-song. Wish You Were Here was fun but not in the same class.
But after having heard Dark Side and The Wall each 1 billion times (by conservative estimate), if I do get in the Floyd mood now I’ll probably choose Animals – often overlooked due to the length of the tracks and consequent lack of radio exposure.
As interesting as the early, Syd Barrett stuff is, and even through Meddle, those can’t be considered among their best, nor can the post-Wall era for the group or the individuals.
What’s funny is that two out of the four most famous tunes of the Syd Barrett-era were never put out on an album. Only on greatest hit types of collections. Those two being, of course, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play.
It takes me back…
I think probably:
…but those 3 are all basically perfect.
“…but those three are all basically perfect.”
Exactly.
And let’s face it.. on any given day, what mood you are in and whichever substance you are indulging in– will determine your experience/enjoyment of these albums.
One is never going to be disappointed in any Pink Floyd album IMHO.
Well, for me, it’s Animals. There is not a moment of that album that I don’t love. And I love the message.
There’s plenty on Wish You Were Here that I don’t really enjoy. I’m not that big of a fan of Crazy Diamond, for example. And Have a Cigar seems like the worst of Dark Side of the Moon.
As for The Wall, I love it. The only thing wrong with it is the hits. What the weakest stuff on The Wall? The Education songs and Comfortably Numb.
The great stuff is like The Thin Ice, Mother, Goodbye Blue Sky, Goodbye Cruel World, Hey You, Nobody Home, and In the Flesh.
I agree with you about Animals. However, I love Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb. Education Part 2 is probably the first Pink Floyd song I ever heard, when I was in elementary school, so it means something special to me, even if it isn’t my favorite of their songs.
Have any of you been to the new Roger Waters Wall tour?
Comfortably Numb is an awesome song with great guitar solos, but it’s Gilmour through and through, and it sticks out like a sore thumb on The Wall, which is Waters’ most personal and domineering creation. It doesn’t belong because it’s too poppy, it’s too Gilmour, and it lacks the Waters touch. Or, to put it another way, it fails as mood music. It tells a story and it advances the story, but it’s mood is all wrong for the message.
I can see what you mean, though I like combination of Waters and Gilmour’s voicing, as in Mother, where Waters voices the questions of the child, and Gilmour the comforting voice of his mother. Final Cut is also a quite personal album, for the most part a Waters’ solo album, but I still like that one.
I agree about Animals, though. Awesome album.
I don’t know. I thought the mood of “Comfortably Numb” was perfect for a song about a near-death experience. It makes sense to me for a song about slipping away from the real world (literally) to sound airier than the rest of the album.
Of course, I think it’s also kind of tricky to judge songs from “The Wall” individually, since they’re all more powerful in the context of the story than they are taken individually.
yup.
The last couple years of high school I wore out the grooves on Meddle. Echoes in particular. Several melodic, textural songs over that period – Green is the Color, etc. still grab me. Dark Side of course took it to the next level but has been overplayed. It’s my understanding that the friction that ulitimately led to the band’s dissolution sprung from Waters’ desire to make concept albums versus Gilmore’s melodic inclinations. I am in Gilmore’s camp.
That’s a difficult question, since I like every phase of their career up through the Final Cut, and I like different albums for different reasons. I like the Wall and Final Cut for the Roger Waters narrative elements, Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Saucerful of Secrets for the more psychedelic sounds. But, I probably like what they were doing in the early to mid seventies the best:
Dark Side
Wish Your Were Here
Animals
Meddle
And some of their more obscure albums, like Obscured by Clouds and More.
But all I’ve done is name most of their albums. Must be a trick question.
OK. Bustin out the vinyl…
HOLY CRAP.. you’re really bringing back some fond memories (not at all substance enhanced) with those three. Throw in some Jethro Tull and I’m good.
I will concede that Syd did not reach his full development as an artist and that Waters did, but Syd’s interrupted development has more to chew on than Waters’ entire ouvre, to me. Waters is to rock albums what Montgomery was to tank warfare: nothing but frontal assault, lots of preening for the general (either one, different styles), and ruin for everyone else involved. Syd was actually a more interesting social observer, and not only because it was acid that fractured his observing lens rather than Waters’ neurotic self-absorption. That Syd could bring a quality of lightness to the proceedings actually gave them greater weight.
Piper at the Gates of Dawn it is.
I loved “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” – what Syd Barrett might have done after a few years honing his skills is up for conjecture, but that first album was surely a great beginning.
In terms of their post-Syd work, I tend to dig on “Wish You Were Here” and “Animals” – both of which seem a bit underrated as some others have mentioned already, and both of which are easily musically and lyrically their finest work. “Dark Side of the Moon” obviously deserves all the props it gets, but man I have heard the whole thing so many times that I would just as soon put on “Wish” or “Animals” instead. “The Wall” was popular when I was a teen, but I never really felt it. The stuff they did in the 1980s and later I found depressingly boring.
Heh, I’m gonna cheat and say “Electric Factory 1970” a 2-Disc live bootleg from a Philly show:
Astronomy Domine
Cymbeline
A Saucerful Of Secrets
Interstellar Overdrive
Fat Old Sun
Green is the Colour/Careful with that Axe Eugene
Old stuff: More (movie soundtrack) just plain rocks.
Psychedelic period: Ummagumma, wonderful renditions of their best from the early trippy period with the individual compositions showing off the genius that made up each part of the group.
Concept period: Animals, no doubt- Dogs is the best track of this period, who needs the rest of the concept albums?
Later work: Momentary Lapse of Reason- Division Bell is probably a better expression of Gilmour’s melodic genius, but Reason carries over enough of Water’s bombast to result in an album that is essentially what the early concept albums could have been with the bonus of years of improving technical proficiency as musicians.
Live: Live at Pompeii- wow, just wow.
Overall favorite: Animals or Reason, depending on my mood.