Pink Floyd To Release New Album! Or Not!

Pink Floyd to release new album!....no wait, it's actually Pink Floyd to release album of unreleased material!....no wait, it's actually Pink Floyd to release album of unreleased material from 1994 recording sessions that didn't include Roger Waters...hmmmm....

So, really, Pink Floyd isn't releasing a new album. What is actually happening here is that a collection of subpar leftovers from a band who can more accurately be called David Gilmour's Exploiting Band Names For Money is going to be released.

Pink Floyd- Dark Side Of The Moon

Driving to a bar after a friend's wedding a couple years ago, someone in the car popped in Dark Side Of The Moon. I was immediately struck both by the notion of how long it must've been since I had listened to it as well as by how much I was enjoying it. I did and do like Pink Floyd, but Dark Side is one of those mythic albums that you feel like you can't even hear any more: it's just too big, too popular, too legendary. Too much has been written about it, and it's similar to most of the output of the Beatles in that it's nearly impossible to experience it for the first time without expectations or a ton of context and information that gets in the way. But something clicked in my head that night about the album that hadn't occurred to me before, and I think it was the simple act of listening to it as a set of great songs that I loved and not as a classic rock monolith.

Pink Floyd's first album is a rightfully beloved cornerstone of 60s psychedelic music, but the band would spend a handful of albums wandering in search of a direction until delivering Dark Side Of The Moon. While I think Floyd's lesser known post-Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, pre-Dark Side era isn't quite as bad as it's often written off as, what is most striking about it is the lack of direction and a strong songwriting focus. Arguably Dark Side is the popular success and creative peak it is because the band were actually writing songs again instead of casting about in a hodgepodge of sonic experiments, extended instrumental stuff, or misguided collections of enforced 'solo' pieces released under the Floyd name. Where Dark Side does dip into experimental stuff—like the proto-techno showpiece 'On The Run', or the iconic wordless vocals from Clare Torry on 'The Great Gig In The Sky'—it serves as a interlude to stitch together the more traditionally anchored songs like 'Time' and 'Money.'

And make no mistake: for all the talk of Dark Side having a reputation as either a stoner album or the one that people use to test out their new stereo systems, this album is the one that established Pink Floyd as being on the level of Led Zeppelin and The Beatles because of its songs. It is hard to point to individual songs as highlights, since most of them flow into each other seamlessly, like how 'Brain Damage' is so chillingly good because of the way it's resolved in 'Eclipse', and how 'Time' calls back to 'Breathe.' But when you really sit down and listen to Dark Side, it's striking how many things you've taken for granted all these years, like the surprisingly funky and lively guitar solo half of 'Any Colour You Like', the atmospheric drum-led intro to 'Time', or the snippets of dialogue taken from interviews with some of the band's roadies and other people who were in Abbey Road at the time. Anyway, the separated-ness of future Floyd classic songs like 'Wish You Were Here' and 'Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 2' may make it easier to talk about them as individual songs, but the main song sections of Dark Side tracks are every bit as good.

Despite all the times that classic albums have been built up, broken down, examined, and re-examined, I still find something instructive and enjoyable about them. Just as Paul McCartney's bass playing and the whimsical vibe of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is what stands out the most to me now, when I listen to Dark Side what I hear isn't the trippy keyboards on 'Any Colour You Like' or the spacey echo of the vocals on 'Us And Them.' No, what stands out is how this is a great batch of songs when you get right down to it, and that is always more important than all the historical context and behind-the-scenes tales of recording session trickery in the world.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Album of the Week: Pink Floyd- Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

It might seem kind of obvious to review a Pink Floyd album--what's next, Greg, taking a crack at the Beatles??--but of all the Pink Floyd albums most people think they remember, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is the most slippery. It is timelessly fascinating in its strange-ness. While most people know Pink Floyd because of the Dark Side Of The Moon and after era, even those who are aware that they were a band who released music as early as 1966 probably don't know just how out there Piper was and remains.

See, I was playing this album at work the other day, and anytime I play something I know they haven't heard before, I always hear it through their ears. It's like giving an oral report to the class and feeling intensely self conscious, only now it's your music you're hearing through others instead of seeing yourself through their eyes. Though no one made any comments to the effect, imagining myself hearing this album for the first time really struck home how bizarre this album is. Yes, by the time this album was released psychedelic music was starting to become a known quantity, but even compared to the 'psychedelic' offerings of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is one, dare I say, trippy album: songs about space, gnomes, scarecrows...eerie, druggy music with extended instrumental passages, otherwordly studio effects and sounds never heard by sober men. Why, that awful demonic duck cackling at the end of 'Bike' is enough to freak people out four decades later.

Of course, most of this can be credited to the visionary Syd Barrett, who semi-accidentally took enough acid, wrote enough weird songs, and then subsequently burned out in just such a way that he almost singlehandedly wrote the book on British psychedelia, which has always been--at least in my limited knowledge--more whimsical than its American counterpart. One must keep in mind that, Bob Dylan's breakthroughs not withstanding, it was considered very bizarre to write songs about the above mentioned material. Hell, one of Pink Floyd's earliest singles was about a guy who stole women's underwear off clotheslines. But if nothing else, the total effect of Piper is of the twin voyages of psychedelia: into the inner self and into outer space. Everyone probably knows 'Bike', 'Interstellar Overdrive', and 'Astronomy Domine', but what about the philosophical, time and nature examining 'Chapter 24'?? And the animal-like screeching at the beginning of 'Pow R. Toc H.', an instrumental that sounds like little else in music history, which so enraptured a younger version of me he used to write the song's title in his notebooks over and over?? And the Tolkien-esque fantasy pastiche of 'Matilda Mother', which flies into the atmosphere, if not outer space, on ethereal, stoned keyboards and guitar??

This is where splitting hairs becomes a necessary evil, because while Dark Side Of The Moon and Piper At The Gates Of Dawn are both considered druggy albums, and they both come from the same band, there are enough differences between them as if to render them incompatible. Yeah, they sound enough alike to make sense, but the Pink Floyd of '67 and the Pink Floyd of '73 were entirely different bands, arguably. While Dark Side is stoner friendly, Piper has extremes of 'cute' and 'experimental' more akin to an acid trip. Dark Side is huge arena rock, intelligent and monolithic; Piper is simply surreal and otherworldly.

The best testament I can give for an album like this is that it's so weird, fascinating, and great that you won't even need drugs. And the last time I found myself describing an album like that, it was Trout Mask Replica...

Deerhunter- Microcastle

The one thing I took away from the Pink Floyd documentary Live At Pompeii wasn't that they were actually a great live band (they were, but that's not what I'm getting at). No, it was that, before Dark Side of the Moon, they were often criticized for being slaves to their technology. Roger Waters tries to deflect this, but there really was a leap from what had come before to the album they were about to release. Nobody thinks of Dark Side of the Moon as a compromising, sell out-style album yet it made the band far more popular and financially successful than they were before. Their music was still pretty odd, druggy and art rock-y and whatnot, but now it was paired with some instantly recognizable and memorable songs. Now, I'm not trying to compare Microcastle to Pink Floyd's legendary masterpiece, but I am trying to compare a criticism I've had for Deerhunter and a lot of other indie bands who pride themselves on textures, noise, and sheer awesome sound: where's the songs, guys?? Stripped of any electronics, Dark Side of the Moon would still be incredible music. And the same goes for Microcastle.

I used to always cringe when I heard that the new album from a band was more 'pop', for lack of a better term, than their previous releases. But if TV On The Radio's Dear Science taught me anything, it's that sometimes a little levity and polish goes a long way. Often the limits imposed on something force you to be more creative. David Lynch's more mainstream works are just as fascinating as his headtrip/surrealisms because he's got to make a sensical story. With Microcastle, Deerhunter wanted to focus on the 'microstructure' of songwriting and to have shorter, more concise songs, too.

This statement isn't going to make a lot of sense until I explain it, but: I've always suspected that I should love Deerhunter's Cryptograms more than I do. The same can be said for the solo album by Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox, which also came out this year under the name Atlas Sound. Cryptograms and Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel explore the territories of shoegazer, indie rock, ambient, dream-pop, and electronic music to varying extents and account for some of the most thrilling and interesting music of the last two years. Yet it took Microcastle to retroactively sell me on them because, as good as they are, they sometimes struck me as pastiche albums. You hear so many obvious influences on them that you begin to question whether the music is really that good or if it just reminds you so much of music you love you want to give it a pass. Microcastle, too, brings up obvious influences but it proves something that always lay under the psychedelic noise-pop of Cryptograms and the daydream ambient ballads of Let The Blind...: Bradford Cox is an incredible songwriter. After Dark Side of the Moon, no one thought of Pink Floyd as the lava lamp soundtrack/weird sound effects band. After Microcastle, no one will think of Deerhunter as only the shoegazer/dream pop lovers that they are. As thrilling as the guitar assault of Cryptograms was, as mesmerizing as the electronic textures of Let The Blind... was, they still had incredible songs under the hood.

The best way to describe Microcastle is to say that it's Deerhunter's 60s album. It still maintains their trademark sound of My Bloody Valentine meets Sonic Youth-at-their-druggiest meets experimental 70s pop ala Brian Eno and David Bowie. Now, though, they've peeled back a layer of experimentalism and let the songs breath. Even at its heaviest and noisiest, Microcastle is a pop album...though that's a relative concept. Play this for the average listener and it would still be druggy, noisey, and/or weird. As for my, the first time I heard the album I thought it was oddly plain. But I was mistaking restraint and an attention to moment-to-moment detail for what initially struck me as the band removing all the cool shoegazer and krautrock stuff. Whatever your initial impression may be, after a couple spins the hooks and sheer effortlessness of Microcastle completely win you over. And when I say it's their 60s album I mean it in terms of the pop edge of the thing as much as I do the production. If the songs of Cryptograms sounded like a dozen guitars layered on top of each other, Microcastle sounds like something that was recorded on an old fashioned four-or-eight-track tape machine. To put it another way, when the patented Deerhunter walls of sound crowd around you on this album, it serves the song and it sounds like it's being played live instead of processed and dropped on top of other tracks via ProTools.

If the opening track--with its slow descending guitar melody--sounds like something that could've easily fit on Cryptograms, then the next track 'Agoraphobia' lets you know what kind of album this'll really be. Written by one of the band's guitarists, it's downright melodic and classicist, recalling some long lost 80s art-pop band you've never heard of. 'Never Stops', with its repetitive-but-not-in-a-bad-way structure, demonstrates the strength of Bradford Cox's songwriting skill, adding layers of guitar squall on the chorus before stripping back down to the simple backing without missing a beat. The title track is a minimalist solo lament by Cox with only a guitar to keep him company until the 2:25 mark, when the drums kick in and we have a ripping rock song that reminds me of a slightly slowed down version of Brian Eno's 'Needles In The Camel's Eye.' Piano is used to haunting effect on 'Green Jacket', while the closer 'Twilight At Carbon Lake' has the same slow jam arpeggio style as Radiohead's 'A Wolf At The Door' but ends with an astonishing guitar climax that is Deerhunter at their shoegazer best. Perhaps the album's best song is the downright twangy 'Saved By Old Times', which borrows acoustic guitar, what sounds like a 12 string Rickenbacker, and a galloping chorus from the best Beatles song circa 1965 never written. Oh, and it's got a bizarre sound collage around the two minute mark that somehow works.

Really, though, what I find most impressive about Microcastle is how much I keep finding to love about it. The general idea is that difficult/experimental albums should reward repeat listening, but this album is great example to the contrary. It's Deerhunter's most accessible and 'pop' album yet, and while that's still a relative concept, Microcastle is all the more incredible for having such depth. Every song has some detail or hook that'll peek your interest on the next listen and, like Cryptograms, it still all holds together like a cohesive work. Without a doubt in my mind, Microcastle is a fantastic album and the best thing Bradford Cox and company have done to date. Essential listening for anyone wondering whether all of us indie rock/music obsessives are full of it or not.