Ranking Pink Floyd 1971-1979

A dedicated Floyd dilettante, I do dig’em when their engineers get polyphonic, less so when they treat sons as discrete experiences.

1. Wish You Were Here (1975)

“You bought a guitar/To punish your ma” is the most truculent lyric, written by Roger Waters about mate Syd Barrett, but as Pink Floyd crashed into The Wall and severed The Final Cut, never mind Waters’ own solo albums, it was a line that boomeranged into the back of Waters’ head. The arrangements and mixing board manipulations on Floyd’s first album after The Dark Side of the Moon are eerie and simple and sometimes lurid: distorted guitar and musique concrète and the Waters howl fill every space of a sumptuous mix. David Gilmour’s work on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts 1-5” remains a master class in every sense. Want shred? It’s there. Blues notes? Listen closely. For the last time in his career Waters let the music say what his words couldn’t, in this case the essential enigma of another human life. Rich in possibilities, Wish You Were Here suggests that Barrett would’ve remained a mystery even without the bad trip.

2. Meddle (1971)

The misspelled “San Tropez” gets at the charm of Meddle. Its execution is wobbly: the sidelong “Echoes” doesn’t sustain its intensity or serenity, and tunes like “One of These Days” dig into the band’s talent for will o’ the wisps (on “A Pillow of Winds” Gilmour’s double-tracked vocal and slide guitar and Water’s fretless bass conjure a tougher but no less addled period David Crosby and George Harrison). Yet it’s of a piece. What contemporaneous reviews averred at the time is hard to find; almost forty years later, Meddle presents itself as a coherent expression of topical innocuousness by a band still teasing the possibilities of the recording studio.

3. The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

First heard on a high school camping trip for which I bought what turned out to be fake acid, The Dark Side of the Moon complemented the fun regardless: the album’s a fake trip too. A period Eno album offers more aural depth without the ruminations on time and mortality, best left in 1992 to Amy Grant’s “I Will Remember You.” And yet! The sparkling guitar textures and Gilmour’s winsome vocal on “Us and Them” achieve an intimacy that acts as counterpoint to the mix and the lyric’s insistence on the abysses between people. “Money” sustains the illusion that Waters had a James Jamerson in him (and I prefer its mix on the eighties comp).

4. Animals (1977)

It has its defenders, and the unbuckling of Waters’ lyrical belt is welcome; no so-called prog band believed in so ruthless a theogony, or, better, no so-called prog ban included a member whose devotion to a misanthropy he confused for a depth of vision produced such occasionally thrilling music. The band built its own studio so that on “Dogs” Rick Wright could manipulate his keyboard lines into EKG patterns, on occasion prodded into relief by Waters’ barking. “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” features some of Gilmour’s toughest guitar lines. Sometimes I wonder whether Pink Floyd wouldn’t have been better served by a merciless examination of the Syd legacy commensurate with Waters’ stated disgust with post-WWII Western society. This comes through on Animals, but Waters, not known for subtlety, might’ve been explicit about it.

5. Obscured By Clouds (1972)

A Floyd version of Van Morrison’s pastoral albums like Veedon Fleece or Tupelo Honey, Obscured By Clouds is obscured by what the band released before and after it. The last gasp of their Syd-era concern with “songs” instead of symphonies or something.

6. The Wall (1979)

Run like hell.