![]() ![]() ![]() David Gilmour’s haunting vocals and those majestic chord changes at the end of “A Saucerful of Secrets” are enigmatic, mysterious, and moving, but you have to sit through several minutes of unquestionably discordant and debatably unpleasant noise to get to it, and the composition takes up a pretty huge chunk of the album it was named for. When you think about it, on every previous album there were moments where the Floyd got freaky for no real reason other than they had a rep as a freaky band, even if it didn’t serve the music they were making all that well. Oh, OK, I think I have it now – Meddle was the first album really when they set aside bizarreness for bizarreness’ sake and focused on creating an album of great songs. Actually, I am going to need an extra sentence because I am not quite there yet. I’ve had a little bit of trouble pinning down what exactly made Meddle so much better than the other Harvest label albums that preceded it – as a matter of fact, as I am typing this sentence the wheels of my mind are desperately spinning trying to sort out what I am going to say in the next sentence that will shed some light on it. After several albums of searching for the right formula, they somehow found their mojo and knocked out a truly great album. Prior to the release of Meddle the most likely scenario was that they would limp along for a few more mediocre albums and drift into obscurity.īut then a most curious thing happened. ![]() Smart money would have said this was a band that was never going to make it big – they’d had plenty of chances and never really got there. While they had produced a handful of great songs on these albums, up to that point there was really no reason to think that Pink Floyd Mk. Atom Heart Mother was an unwieldy, if occasionally rewarding, mess. More likewise had a few good songs, but was never going to set the world on fire, while Ummagumma paired a pretty great live album with a pretty unlistenable studio album. A Saucerful of Secrets had its moments for sure, but it was mostly a Syd Barrett hangover really. Because it is, without question, the album where Pink Floyd finally pulled it all together, having spent a few years wandering the the wastelands of a Syd Barrett-less existence trying to sort out what kind of a band they were. And if I had recognized it as an ear at the first and if it had scared me away from ever listening to the album like the cover of Blind Faith has made me determined to never be caught dead listening to that album, it would have been a real shame. Besides, I went years before I even realized it was an ear, I thought it was some abstract psychedelic shape for the longest time. But then Storm Thorgerson initially proposed a close up of a baboon’s butt as the cover for Meddle, so I guess it could have been worse. I honestly can’t imagine why you’d want to put a picture of an ear on your album. As a matter of fact, when have you ever heard anyone say “That person has really attractive ears”? It may be the only part of the human body that no one has ever found attractive. There are a lot of parts of the human body that can be attractive, but the ear is not one of them. Every so often they have earwax and crud in them, though they look disgusting enough even when they don’t. Have you ever taken a good, hard look at someone’s ear? They have all these gross ridges and folds and some of them have these earlobes dangling off them for who knows what reason. ![]()
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