That one vote for Pulse was me. While I don’t believe it really qualifies as a separate album like the rest, it does include a full performance of Dark Side of the Moon, along with a nice collection of essential PF tunes.
However, excluding Pulse, I’d vote for Wish You Were Here, even thoughDark Side is arguably their magnum opus. Shine On You Crazy Diamond is pure epic genius for me.
smacks Nine with glove
Pistols at dawn, Sir!
I voted for The Final Cut just to spite you. (I was contemplating Animals vs. Wish You Were Here vs. The Wall vs. The Final Cut as I read the thread…)
Dark Side by far man
I voted Piper but it’s damn difficult to choose. I love so many of them, and there are none (well prior to The Final Cut at any rate) that I do not (or did not) thoroughly enjoy.
The past tense is because I’ve overplayed many of their albums to the point that I can’t HEAR them when I put them on any more; I’ve memorized the sounds so completely that they now fade into the background 
(DSOTM for sure, and Animals).
I admit that the post-Wall offerings just haven’t done it for me. Not unlistenable, just not great.
Since PF is my favorite band, it’s hard to pick just one, but I have always had a special place in my heart for Animals.
Cheers.
I’ve always felt the same way, but until now I was never able to put that feeling into words.
Voted for “Obscured by Clouds”.
I know most of the love goes to Dark Side, but I will always prefer Wish You Were Here. Shine on you crazy, diamond(s)!!!
The best? IMHO? Depends on what phase of life I was going through…been listening to them for 36 years (from 10 y.o. to present) and at some point in my life, about 9 separate Floyd albums have been my favorite at one time or another; sometimes my personal favorite were favorited 2 or 3 times at different times in my life. DSOTM and The Wall kept trading spots back in my late teens, but then Animals and WYWH traded spots back and forth in my college years. Then Final Cut, Meddle, Obscured, Piper, Saucerful, and Meddle again. Right now…I am more likely to thoroughly enjoy Animals and Wish You Were Here (except for “Have a Cigar”) over the other ones with Meddle pushing it’s foot back into the door.
I guess my ears have changed over the years like my pallet. I love them all and could not choose one over the other although Roger Waters work seems to appeal the most to me overall. I either have 9 favorites or no favorites at all. I just can’t vote for one.
I’m kind of the opposite. I spent so much time in my teen years thinking that The Wall was some sort of holy writ that now it almost embarrasses me to listen to it. DSotM doesn’t have the same stigma in my mind.
This would have been my first thought, too.
But then I went with DSOM because, well, how could I not?
Animals is superb. But it’s all magnificent. Their the whole body of work is a psychedelic playground. This includes the album art, visuals and props for shows as well. That has always been one of my favorite things about Pink Floyd, they spared no expense to create a complete experience. Genius.
That said, I do think DSOM is still the absolute masterpiece of the lot.
Wish You Were Here for me.
DSotM is immaculate. but there’s nothing on it as superb as “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.
Meddle has “One of These Days”, “Fearless” and the mindblowing “Echoes”, but it has weaker moments, too.
Animals is hard to argue against, but doesn’t feel like Pink Floyd so much as Waters/Gilmour.
The Wall? “Hey You”, “Comfortably Numb” and “Run Like Hell” are some of the best tracks in the Floyd catalogue, but a) the story overall is like the stuff of bad teenage poetry, b) Gerald Scarfe’s artwork is a big departure from the Floyd aesthetic and c) it’s a Waters solo album with David Gilmour and Bob Ezrin essentially turning lead into gold, where they could.
Wish You Were Here has it all: a sense of being a “band effort”, a strong theme, fantastic music, longer soundscapes and arguably the best artwork by Storm Thorgerson in the entire Floyd catalogue. It’s the definitive post-Barrett Pink Floyd album.
I think Waters was utterly serious about the subject matter on The Wall. Whether or not it’s “bad teenaged poetry” is a YMMV issue. I happen to think its a brilliant album. You don’t. Fair enough.
Whether or not The Wall was really a “Pink Floyd” album other than in name is kinda a seperate issue, because it really wasn’t. It carried the Pink Floyd name, though. And it’s magnificent.
How anyone can’t see the brilliance in the cynical nature of the entire work is beyond me.
I love The Wall – I’ve got the album, the movie and the Live in Berlin DVD (and I remember watching the broadcast back in 1990, too). It’s probably my most-played Floyd album.
But for me it’s a guilty pleasure. It’s loaded with filler, IMHO, and song-fragments that aren’t given a chance to develop. IIRC, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”, for example, was a one-verse aside until Ezrin looped it and added-in the schoolchildren and Gilmour’s solo.
And the fact that Waters took the whole thing so seriously is what kills it for me, when I actually stop to think about it. There’s no irony or whimsy, just a 90 minute-long diatribe about how terrible his childhood was. I agree with David Gilmour about the story essentially being…
Anyway, overall it’s an excellent album (in the “overblown rock opera” genre), and one I enjoy immensely, but I don’t consider it an excellent (or even great) Pink Floyd album, let alone their best.
But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
Then why on Earth did Gilmour agree to the restrictions on the album (like minimizing both Rick Wright and to a greater degree, Nick Masons) input while he simultaneously laid down some of the most memorable and tasty rock guitar tracks ever?
Money?
It’s a toss up for me between Animals and The Wall, they are such different albums that it’s hard to even compare them, but if you put a gun to my head and said “Pick your favorite, you have 1 second” I’d always go with Animals (except when I’m looking for something a bit louder and more upbeat and I really like the way Roger sounds on that album).
In fairness, Gilmour says his assessment has been “jaundiced” and made in hindsight. See here.
As for the Wright situation, there’s so many stories about it that it’s hard to know the truth. My sense, however, is that Waters had everyone by the short-and-curlies, financially, since he was the only irreplaceable component of the Wall project., so he was calling the shots and Gilmour had no say, ultimately. Of course money’s a factor, but why shouldn’t it be?
But I think the real bad blood was generated in the Final Cut sessions, and perhaps if Gilmour had known what the future held, he would’ve made different choices in '79.
I spent most of my late teens / early twenties tripping on acid, as may be obvious from my handle. Pink Floyd will always hold special place in my heart. I remember listening to DSotM for the first time at some guy’s house where we smoked the most potent weed we’d ever had to that point, and while the On the Run played very loudly one of my buddies shouted to the host: “What’s in this shit? I’m feeling my own fucking invisibility here!” hehheh, good times.
Or the first time I took shrooms, which was also the first time I hear Meddle. Several of us had gone camping, and I accidentally ate way too much. I ended up half passed out and mildly convulsing near the campfire while Echoes played. At one point I managed to get out: “Green. That’s the sound green makes.” We all thought that pretty funny, then later that summer those same buddies and I went to see Floyd live at Giants Stadium. They played Echoes, and during that part of the song the big screen above the the stage doing trippy visualizations had exactly one color: green. When my buddy pointed that out I laughed my ass off.
I was saddened toward the end of highschool when they released Momentary Lapse of Reason. To quote another buddy: “That’s what you have to have to buy it.” Ah well, it’s not like Grateful Dead or Frank Zappa wrote any masterpieces after the 80s either.
While I have always enjoyed the older stuff more than my friends did, Wish You Were Here gets the nod. I considered The Wall – which blew me away the first time I saw the movie, tripping very hard – but it’s too self-contained. One piece leads inexorably to the enitire whole, and that gets tiresome. Much like how I’d never vote Tommy as The Who’s greatest album despite loving it. Each song just carries too much extra baggage.
Wow…tuff call. I am torn between The Final Cut , Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Meddle.
Piper was the 1st Floyd album I ever bought , back in 1984, I think it was,so I will go with that i guess.
'Cause they like, wrote a song about it, and stuff?
Hence the “oh the irony” smiley…
I own a copy of the book A Saucerful Of Secrets and it sheds a good amount of light into the inexorable isolation of the bandmates from one another as time progressed…I’d recommend it to any Floyd fan.
Voted for* Wish You Were Here*. Though my favourite is Animals I think that the songs/tunes on WYWH and are stronger but I like the rockier approach on Animals. DSotM lacks a lot of what I think Floyd are best at - drawn out atmospheric instrumental sections - plenty of those on Ummagumma, Meddle, WYWH and Animals, DSotM not so much and The Wall? I can’t recall any. I’d take just the intro and outro from Sheep over the whole of the Wall except the guitar solos.
Syd’s Floyd was a different band entirely. No point comparing.