I always imagine this part as ‘pterodactyls in the fog’. I love it, too, but I think this is the part Idle Thoughts especially disliked.
Oooh! I like that description!
And I agree I think it was the part he hated.
Ya know, I was going to check that before I said it and took a gamble. I haven’t seen the movie in probably 20 years and even then probably only saw it 2 times, maybe 3, between high school and college and I’m quite sure I never learned much about it then.
In any case, The Wall, the album still tells a story and listening to each track on it’s own isn’t going to work. Many bands have a single track that’s simply an interlude between two songs or a track that serves as an intro to another song. Dissecting it as if it’s a standalone song isn’t going to do anyone any good.
To me, it’s like saying ‘this scene is just a guy shaving his head, I’m sure the reset of Darren’s stuff is rubbish as well’. The Wall, like Animals, is meant to be listened to is complete album. I mean, take a break if you want. But if you’re not going to pick out the ‘good’ songs, just let it play and don’t worry about what track is playing. Similar things can be said for DSOTM and most of the other PF albums.
I would humbly suggest you try out Division Bell despite the whinging above me. It’s a great album in its own right and doesn’t have Waters’ Downer attitude infusing it. I think it’s in line with the kind of album I think you’d like,IT. Skip the opening “Cluster One” which is a waste of time , IMO. I really like "Keep Talking and “Take it Back”. Also, Momentary Lapse of Reason. Crank the intro to “Sorrow”, you won’t regret it.
I don’t really know what to recommend to a listener who prefers “Seamus” to “Echoes”. You’re on your own.
With many bands/artists, though not all, as good an approach as any is to start with a “Best Of” or “Greatest Hits” album and then dig deeper if you like what you hear. From your list, I’d put at least Steely Dan and ELO into that category.
To me, it’s swimming in the ocean at night, and those are whale songs.
I like that. That probably fits closer to the lyrics in the first two verses, though the rest are still more poetic than illuminating. The last line, “And call to you across the sky” fits better with pterodactyls. 
I love this bit in the lyrics page I found:
[4:56 - 19:11 - Instrumental]
You don’t have to transcribe that part…
Dum. Dum. Dum. Di-de-di-de Di-de-di-de Di-de-di-de … well, you get it. 
I always thought that sound was an albatross. You know, the one hanging motionless upon the air?
Bill Nelson used a similar effect in the Be Bop Deluxe song Sister Seagull.
Some asides how a couple of people in my life got into Floyd via unexpected means…
- A roommate of mine through college was a massive jazz snob, belittled and rejected anything ‘rock’ as ‘simplistic moronic lite beer for the masses’. I was listening to Roger Waters ‘Pros & Cons of Hitchhiking’ one day and during one of the sax solos he remarked on it sounding really cool. ‘David Sanborn, I think’, says I. He geeks out, being a huge Sanborn fan, and borrowed the album for a listen. He loved it and played it to death.
Seeing the crack in his armor, I remarked that Pink Floyd, ‘You know of course, Roger Waters full band ;)’ featured a lot of good sax players. They also played a lot of jazz festivals in their early days…bam, the hook was set, and a new PF fanatic was born.
- My wife always dismissed PF as ‘60s drug music’ and never listened to them, pre-emptively rejected any attempt to get her to try. One day I’m listening to one of Syd Barrett’s albums, Madcap Laughs I think, and she overhears it and says ‘Whoever this guy is, Beck totally ripped this guy off, it’s awesome!’. Turns out she’s a rabid Beck fan. She devoured all of Syd’s stuff, and then followed through on all of PF’s catalog and now loves it. What finally earned her official PF merit badge was remarking one day that ‘Syd’s Floyd is the real Floyd, it all went downhill when Gilmour joined’
Yep.
The hardest rock song they ever did was The Nile Song on relics and elsewhere. It’s kind of unique in their catalog.
Note that he also called One of These Days an instrumental, which is arguable, but it does have lyrics.
It has one line of barely intelligible words.
But sure, lyrics.
Yeah, I’d call “One of these Days” an instrumental. Let’s not be too nitpicky.
“One of these days, I’m going to cut you into little pieces.” is upbeat?
Hehehehe, I’ve loved this thread, Idle Thoughts. When I was catching up with it, I predicted that “One of these Days” and “Echoes” were gonna be problems. I love them, but I’ve stayed out of the “Is it the end of the Rock era” because the rock I love was almost never popular. For instance, “One of these Days” is probably my favorite post-Syd PF song, hands down*. But then again, I love an instrumental because among other things, it will never betray me with lyrics that I now realize are offensively stupid and don’t realize that they are. Plus, once you’ve said “One of these days, I’m going to cut you into little pieces”, what else is there left to say? If you added any other lyrics, they would be, (as Joe Bob would say), a whole bunch of plot getting in the way of the story. The sound you hate in the middle of the song is a tremolo. I kind of collect that effect, and also delays - the effect on the basses in that song.
And then, you love both “Seamus” (which I love) and “San Tropez” (which I usually groove a little bit to (especially during the solo) and tolerate without skipping). Woah, same planet, different worlds.
We both kind of have the same opinion of The Wall (some good songs, but it is repetitive), but wildly differing opinions of DSOTM (Oooh, I like me some good Moog work and non-lyrical vocals.That record is perfect, IMHO).
In reference to either songs becoming very different songs or songs becoming completely different songs in the middle: That’s kind of due to that era of rock being extremely aspirational. To totally change a song and then build it back into the thing it came from is hard. Similarly, if they could arrange their songs into a sort of operetta, that’s harder than writing just a rock song that follows a single theme. So, they were proud of it even if it wasn’t the easiest thing to listen to and digest. I’m not saying this reflects badly on your taste; but your taste does seem to lean toward a certain arrangement to a song, and that wasn’t what they or a lot of their contemporaries at the time were aiming for. Actually, they were aiming for the opposite most of the time. Rush will do a lot of the same things Pink Floyd does with regard to arrangements, but will not really have all the weird noises or extended instrumental interludes that deviate from western scales into less strict ideas of musicality. I will be interested to hear what you think of them, because they are similar but different.
But again: same planet, different worlds. If I could somehow convince you that instrumentals were the pinnacle of the Rock song, like I believe, through force of making you listen to them: I’d do it. But it doesn’t work that way. Let us know what you think of the rest of it. I doubt you’re gonna change anyone’s mind (it’s a matter of taste, after all), but its fun to hear what new ears think!
*And really, I only like one or two non-instrumental Syd songs, but those instrumentals are some of my favorites. I’ll listen to your mom do covers of them.
Okay, I listened to Atom Heart Mother tonight, as it rains outside and is (currently) 2 in the morning.
So…in opening the wiki article for this album, it appears the song Atom Heart Mother itself is composed of six parts. The beginning really kind of sounds like some kind of opening to a Star Wars movie or something like that. I feel like a great, huge movie is opening and that I should go get a bucket of popcorn and settle in.
Okay, so it’s become abundantly clear that this is pretty much just ALL instrumental. No wonder people above were telling me to skip it. I get it now. Still, I pressed on. I stayed the course. I persevered. I sat and listened to it all, in one go. It was…very odd, to say the least. A lot sounded like video game music. Some sounded like a great sci-fi movie was starting up. Even other parts of it sounded like a church choir…or something an aboriginal tribe might chant. I can’t deny it was a pretty amazing fanfare of epic proportions. …Just trying to imagine a band, in a studio, putting together all of those sounds and noises and music litanies, one right after the other…; musta been a pretty huge partaking.
I can’t really give my opinion on the specific six parts because I don’t know when or where any of them specifically started or ended…but as a whole, it wasn’t horrible. Just…I dunno…I just listened until the end, not really thinking or feeling anything. I guess the one that started around 10 minutes (which, by my calculations, should have been part IV: Funky Dung) was the most fun to listen to. The most annoying was the one after that, so, I guess part V: Mind Your Throats Please.
Okay, so, aside from that song, it had four others, three that had words and another long one that was all instrumental. If was okay, but a slow song. There’s lots of slow songs I like, though…but this wasn’t one of them. It was just a little too…slow, drab, listless, depressing-sounding. Take your pick. Next was Summer '68, which I liked. A lot, actually. If any song on this album was the one I liked the most, it was this one. Good melody and piano that suddenly EXPLODES into a faster and louder piece. Very nice. I found myself tapping my foot to this one. Oooh, and now a horn coming in. A very strong horn. See? I can appreciate good instrumentals and a lot of different ones used in creative ways. I wouldn’t have expected that horn just now, but there it was. And then later, a huge mix of many different instruments…all to dissolve back into the piano and nice singing. Two pianos, actually, it sounded like. Much like the season is for many, in real life, I found SUMMER '68 to be very uplifting for the soul. Then sad-sounding and slow Fat Old Sun started…and I have to admit, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t as bad as I usually find slow songs. Very pleasing to the ears. Reminded me a little bit of “Mother Nature’s Son” by The Beatles. It was relaxing and serene to listen to and I LOVED the guitar solo near the end.
And lastly, as most of you knew was coming, was another long instrumental, that also had multiple parts: Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast. See? It even has the word “PSYCHEDELIC” IN the freaking title. So I was guessing it was probably gonna sound…oooh, I dunno…maybe psychedelic-ish? And this one seemed to have pretty much ALL of the things I hated combined. Ever since the start of my listening, the things I’ve been saying I’m not a huge fan of: The random “non-music” noises, the mumbling, the songs that are just instrumentals, the space agey type of “out there” LSD type of music, weird changes in tone and melody…even a part where the music just suddenly stops and is silent for a bit and more “random scrabbling around” is heard. What, did they spin a wheel of random to decide what to do on this one as they were writing it? Even when the song appeared to be mostly NON-annoying for once (around the time that part II: Sunny Side Up started), it had to have some weird, random noises start again. Ah well, I guess it’s supposed to be “psychedelic”. …It was like everything I dislike ALL THROWN IN THIS ONE just to solely piss me off. This song, I have to be honest, is probably the Pink Floyd song I have HATED THE MOST out of EVERY ONE I have heard, so far (from the beginning, through five albums). Yes, that’s right. It’s official: Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast is, IMO, the WORST SONG by them. At least so far. I haven’t listened to everything yet,…but it will be hard to beat this level of suckiness.
Anyway, as those of you predicted, I didn’t like this album too much. It wasn’t bad…it just wasn’t my thing. The six part Atom Heart Mother I didn’t really enjoy, simply because I’m not into “instrumentals only”, but Summer '68 and Fat Old Sun were both very good. However I still rate this album (as a whole) lower than Dark Side of the Moon, which I, at least, liked half of.
The best Pink Floyd albums that I have heard (so far).
- Animals
- Meddle
(big gap) - The Wall
(HUGE gap) - Dark Side of the Moon
- Atom Heart Mother
…Or, put more simply:
I LOVED:
Animals
I REALLY LIKED:
Meddle
I THOUGHT ALL RIGHT:
The Wall
I SORT OF DISLIKED:
Dark Side of the Moon
I HATED
Atom Heart Mother
Next up, I’ll be listening to Wish You Were Here…either later tonight or tomorrow.
And then…after that…I think that THIS will be the order I’ll listen to the rest:
Obscured By Clouds
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
The Final Cut
The Division Bell
Ummagumma
More
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
A Saucerful of Secrets
The Endless River
Your process is good to witness. I knew there’d be a ton of thoughtful Doper commentary on PF so am glad I have my popcorn.