The Floyd-Hole: Every Pink Floyd Album - Part 1

 Hello,

I am going to listen to every Pink Floyd album. I will write reviews about it. 

Of note:

I am not generally a Pink Floyd fan. I just don't listen to them enough to form a proper, informed opinion. I am hoping this experience will give me a new appreciation for Pink Floyd (it worked when I did this for the albums of David Bowie at the onset of the quarantine).

I will be reviewing each song on the album briefly, with a summary album review at the end.

I'm listening to all this on YouTube - it may exclude the odd "super rare live event recording" or what have you. For now, I'm just following along with the discography in Wikipedia.

From here on out, I'm abbreviating Pink Floyd as "PF".

Now, on to the show!

THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN - REVIEW

The first song, Astronomy Domine, feels like if PF were crafting a song specifically for a road house jukebox, except the roadhouse is from another dimension and all its patrons are countrified aliens. Very twangy guitar riffs, lots of "chugga-chugga" and faux-CB radio static.

Next is Lucifer Sam, and it has a very strong surfer rock vibe. I think PF was trying to find their sound by throwing different styles at a wall and hoping something sticks. Very faint psychedelia compared to my expectations, with a bit of the hippy twee underneath. 

Matilda Mother leaves the gate already talking of kings and scarlet eagles and misty riders, setting itself up as a trope-filled psychedelic song, complete with weird electric sitar sounds and breathing. I think PF was cribbing notes from Led Zeppelin on this track.

Flaming sounds very twee, almost like something the Scooby-Doo gang would make if they were all tripping on acid. It's got random sound effects, ghostly wailing, even more electric sitars, and has more key changes than a swinger's party.

Pow R. Toc H is up next, and it has a weird jungle screech intro leading into some kind of jazzy piano solo that wraps back around to the jungle madness eventually (more Apocalypse Now rather than Jungle Book). It's jarring, and yet tapers off into a smooth organ piece at the end - truly bizarre.

Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk comes in with a more upbeat and chaotic rhythm. It's definitely trying hard to be a frenzied song, but ironically, I found it faded into the background very easily. It goes all over the place, but the backbeat never really changes, so it just feels like jumbled words hanging on a stable frame.

Interstellar Overdrive has a ton of classic hard-rocking guitar licks and drum riffs at the outset, but quickly diverges into "experimental" territory. The safe consistency of the rock guitar falls away into random plucking notes, strange electronic beeping sounds, and an angry organist. The whole track sounds like they overlapped two different warm-up sessions, and feels very amateur (they were amateurs at this point though, so it checks out). This is also the longest album track by far, but I was ready to check-out halfway through. The ending is quite melancholy, but with that campy '60s organ sound that just makes it all seem a bit goofy. Then they do this stereo mixing thing where the sound bounces from one ear to the other - it's almost painful to listen to this song.

The next song, The Gnome, shifts the whole tone of the album on a dime. It's twee to the gills, literally a song about a gnome, sounding like something Ringo Starr would write. The lyrics are simple as if written by a child. I seriously suspect this was intended for children - I can't think of any reason an adult would enjoy this song other than nostalgia.

Chapter 24 is another a hippy-dippy song with a sort of electric snake-charming flute played in the background. The lyrics are deliberately zany and at this point, it feels like PF have switched role-models over to the Beatles (during their "India self-discovery" years).

Scarecrow combines machine-style whirring with hippie-style chanting to form a very mediocre song, with lyrics that sound like they were lifted from a children's book. It is thankfully brief.

Bike jumps in there with a strange carnival soundtrack, including calliope backing and bombastic barker singing. Midway it switches to a weird audio "skit" of rusty metal noises, very un-musical industrial clanking, and bizarre laughing clown squeaky-toy noises. They've definitely chosen to end the album on something memorable.

Overall: you can tell this is definitely PF's first album, because they refuse to nail down one style, instead shooting weird songs into the radio-void with a scattergun and hoping to find direction by what sticks. Their inspiration seems to draw heavily from mainstream acts like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, albeit with a more deliberately zany slant. Overall, not an album I would listen to in my spare time or for personal enjoyment - it's more like a cultural artifact; a vestigial album of PF's work before they found their sound. Perhaps by definition, this may be the band's most "experimental" album, because they are literally experimenting throughout the whole thing, trying to nail down a style for their work going forward.