The Floyd-Hole: Every Pink Floyd Album - Part 9

 WISH YOU WERE HERE - REVIEW

The album opens with the first 5 parts of a 9-part opus: Shine On You Crazy Diamond. 

Part 1 has a relaxing lead-in of synth and spacey noises - pretty typical PF stuff, though this has a lot of ambient tone to it, as if creating for atmosphere rather than for music (which works for it, since the song is growing into something bigger). 

At Part 2, it keeps the vibe but switches instruments at the 4-minute mark of the overall song, introducing an echoing guitar pluck and some hefty drum rhythms, and kicks the tempo up only a touch into something more rock/blues-focused. The guitar and accompanying organ nail the morose nature of blues music, so much so that lyrics aren't even needed. 

Part 3 is a seamless transition from Part 2; It keeps a consistent backbeat and the same sorrowful guitar. I didn't know that "ambient blues" was a style of music, but PF made it work here. There's not much to differentiate this from Part 2 though.

The lyrics finally show up at Part 4, although I found them comparatively optimistic-sounding when paired to the tone of the rest of the music, for some reason. This part of the song has a gospel vibe to it, what with the organ music blaring and a sort of choral accompaniment. It still manages to keep the same steady pace and blues/gospel tonality throughout.

A saxophone is introduced in Part 5, and things kick into a much more upbeat and jazzy sound. The track has a "tumbling feeling", probably instilled by the repeating cascading guitar chords played in the background. Everything feels jazzy yet sullen in that "noire" sort of way, until eventually fading away.

Welcome To The Machine wraps up the first side of the album, kicking off with warbling electronic noises and buzzer sound effects until the acoustic guitar has a chance to show up. The singing is done in a monotonous way, evoking the sadness of conformity, which is what I suspect this song was intended to rebel against. More warbles and SFX throughout, alongside small guitar crescendos that crash into some heavy synthesizer sounds. The lyrics talk of controlled dreams, envy, and inevitability - very emotionally deflating to someone listening with a keen ear. Despite it, things get pretty jaunty at the end, before transitioning with a weird artificial car noise and some sort of party conversation.

Have a Cigar, by comparison, is like night and day: upbeat, with a funky, plucky vibe. The lyrics are optimistic and encouraging. The tempo is generally more fast-paced and switches up constantly. It's a good emotional building up of what Welcome To The Machine had just torn down. The guitar work in the latter half has a distinct "Miami Vice" kind of '80s sound to it (a decade before its time, mind you). 

The titular Wish You Were Here is next, opening with the most pleasant and catchy acoustic guitar riff to date. Finally, this is a song you can sing along to - it's sickeningly sweet compared to its predecessors, practically a ballad, and seemingly out-of-place when heard right on the heels of everything else. The rhythm has a consistent though pleasant back and forth movement that gets me swaying alongside. It fades into wind sounds, perhaps suggesting it was only a mirage of optimism on this otherwise gloomy album.

We go back to the second half of  Shine On You Crazy Diamond to end the album.

Part 6 leads in with a chugging bass line backing some light sci-fi synthesizer notes, which makes for a good build up into whatever is coming next. A steel guitar transforms the track into something a bit more rugged and rock-oriented; a big shift compared to the gospel/blues vibe of the earlier Parts of the song. The guitar stings sound almost like screams at the end - a neat effect.

Part 7 takes the sound way back down to the roots of the song, making it nearly indistinguishable from Part 2 and Part 3. On its own, this would make for a dull entry, but it's needed to link the first half of the whole song to the second, so it can be forgiven.

Part 8 appropriates a lot of the funky sound of Part 5, complete with a bumping bassline and that same "tumbling" feeling, though it feels more like "tumbling upward" as the song gets progressively faster and faster. Zany synthesizers carry this part into the next one, but greatly downshifts the tone back to its morose fundamentals.

Part 9 wraps everything up in its own depression-inducing way, feeling like something to played over the ending credits of a sad sci-fi movie. With no lyrics to speak of, synthesizers and a slow drum beat lead the song back out into the nothingness from whence it came -a strangely fitting wrap for the album.

Overall: Like Dark Side Of The Moon, this album needs to be taken whole and consumed as a single piece. It does a better job of keeping consistency than DSotM did, however - admittedly because most of the album is a single song broken up into several tracks. The standout songs are the ones that stand alone; Welcome To The Machine and Wish You Were Here are particularly good even when isolated from the album. At this point, PF is firmly in the psychedelia-inducing prog-rock camp, and this album is the strongest indicator of that shift so far. When compared to the previous album, it's tough for me to determine which I prefer - I suppose there's a reason the two are often ranked together at the top of the list of PF's best work. While not quite as famous as DSotM, this album certainly evokes the quintessential PF paradigm.