Pink Floyd - 1970 - Meddle

My favorite Pink Floyd album. A really spacey, wacky album yet very groovy and fun. Has a nice warpy feel to it.

An incredible album that combines a lot of different elements from noise to rock and roll, weird ambient interludes and typical Pink Floydian sampling. The first half of the album serves as a primer for the epic second half and is incredibly absorbing. It opens with the driving, nearly psychotic bass line of “One of These Days,” firmly establishing a number of the core aspects of the album: its wackiness and psychological depth, its predominant rock undertones and a significant step away from much of the earlier material that had been alluded to in Atom Heart Mother (over the orchestral and operatic nature of much of their work to come and the crazy psychedelia of their first two albums). Unlike Dark Side of the Moon, this album is heavily based on its two sides as distinct entities, the first side mostly being a collection of shorter songs and the second side dedicated entirely to the mammoth “Echoes,” a 23-minute epic chock full of Beatles’ lyric references (“inviting and inciting me”; “across the sky…..”; a submarine is referenced in the first stanza. The lyrics are vaguely evocative of much of the Beatles’ trippiest songs, “Across the Universe,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Yellow Submarine”) and built around a single ‘ping’ heard consistently throughout the song.

In many ways the album is a lovely exercise in duality, with each half presenting a slightly different, yet equally crucial role in establishing the tenor of the album. The first side houses a more complex set of themes, styles and sonic vocabulary but only because the second side is simply a single massive song, though it effectively combines many of these original themes from the first side and expands upon them. In a way, the first side acts as an album-in-mini in which the band explores new ground, showing off its developing stylistic upheaval from a spacey, brilliant but rather untethered psychedelic rock band into a firmly rooted progressive rock band. That said, the band’s flair for the goofy (the sweeping guitar flanges of “San Tropez”), offbeat (the recording of the crowd in “Fearless”) and scary (the psychosis of the ‘protagonist’ of “One of These Days”) never subsides. I find that the first half really seems like a cohesive larger piece, where the listener (or maybe it’s just me) hears the songs as eliding into one another to the extent that I often can’t tell the difference between them unless I give it a bit of thought. Similar ideas are explored in Dark Side of the Moon, though in that album each song is so drastically different from one another and its really the borders of the songs that crossover and fade into one another rather than the general textural guidelines.

In Meddle, the songs aren’t really connected or linked thematically, but each one is generally built around similar underlying principles: lots of repetitive guitar work; a slowly developing and unfolding structure; an exploration of minimal AND orchestral rock arrangements; noise sampling and ambient loops. Though the sounds are vastly different, the songs are vaguely reminiscent of one another and work quite well hand-in-hand. It shows the band exploring a lot of new material and really establishing itself as a progressive rock band. What’s more, a lot of the sonic images and themes touched on in the first half reemerge and evolve within the second half. It’s almost like the band is showcasing its newest achievements in the first half in order to highlight how they can best be implemented in the second.

“Echoes” itself is ridiculous. Ridiculously long, ridiculously good, ridiculously prophetical (of both later Pink Floyd albums and future developments in progressive, experimental and largely instrumental rock). It’s also very simple (I mean it’s got a lot of complexities and intricacies, but the core is simple), built around a single “pinging” sound and the titular theme. It constantly seems to fade in and out, thematically departing, yet always “echoing” back. And in many ways it seems to be a echo of the first half of the album, yet in a more evolved (or, for lack of wanting to sound belittling of the first half, grandiose). “Echoes” itself is a masterpiece of complex instrumentation and one of Pink Floyd’s most ambitious pieces at any given period of their career. Like the first side it is heavily based on strange ambient loops and heavy repetition of almost every part. The whole album thus becomes an echo of itself on every level of structure, detail, texture and lyrical themes.

Basically if you’re going to have a Pink Floyd other than Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall (neither of which are even in my top three, I only mention them because EVERYONE has them), just fucking download it. Actually, go out and buy it. Always buy albums. Especially this one. It’s a masterpiece

Pink Floyd - 1971 - Meddle.zip