Pink Floyd

The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

All I need to live is this album and a supply of bread

Review Score:

(10/10)
Almost any random five seconds of this album is better than the life work of most musicians, and contains more musical ideas. This be a thickly packed album, mates. Turning the volume as high as it will allow itself to go, I notice beautiful dense intersections of organ, bass, voice, guitar, drum, and sound effect filling every fraction of a second like the tangles of a fractal. I can listen to Piper at any scale I want to--grooving to the general sound of a song brings out one thing, but paying attention to the details brings out seventeen different new songs. There are as many songs in this album as you have time to notice, because the album is a well connected play of genius like almost nothing I've ever heard.

Syd Barrett sounds like he's molesting his guitar, and his style is like something developed in seclusion from all previous currents of music. I guess I could call it proto-space-funk-on-speed, and I like it more than Hendrix. But the two famous guitarists are different. Hendrix, to me, is best for those strange little passages that come out of nowhere, sometimes, in his solos, creating a brief musical world of strangely organic, "dripping" melody and rhythm that never was before and never will be again. Barrett is a wizard who uses his guitar to create endlessly inventive un-musical sounds, but layers these sounds together in a frenzied and pounding way that somehow wonderfully makes them into music. Well--I guess they're not that much different. Barrett's weird, like listening to a flamenco player with a third hand in the middle of an electrified mental breakdown. But enough of that. He's gorgeous.

Meanwhile Wright, the organ player, puts down the moods necessary and achieves some astonishing beauties that last just long enough to make me care and just briefly enough to make me miss them after they pass, especially on Matilda Mother and Pow R Toc H. The drums whack and boom as if they were inside your skull. The bass scares. And the lyrics are about flowers, stories, trips, clouds, hide and seek, madness, paranoia, space, and everything cool. Astronomy Domine balances space gitarr w/ powerfully smooth celestial organ flows. Interstellar Overdrive should be played in the cockpit of the space shuttle as it takes off. And there's a song about a cat which is wicked.

Hope I've turned more people on to the Piper.

Please send bread. I'm hungry.

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