What's the "Darkest" and "Happiest" Pink Floyd albums?

[rememberaday]

JEFF! YOU'RE BACK!!



I find The Wall to be very opera....at times, it's dark, at other times it's downright pretentious.

[danielcaux]

so "any fool" knows a dog needs a home...... not exactly the exhaulted bastion of a romance is it??

But true love has nothing to do with romance. Romance is just a fairly tale people like to buy into, flowers and chocolates and passion and all that dreamy escapist stuff...

True love is someone willing to donate you an organ so you can stay alive... trust and support against all odds.

[Bigmanpigman]

Searching out anything approaching 'happy' in Floyd albums would be a bit like trying to find one of Elton John's ex girlfriends, but I reckon if you went all the way back to the Sid era there would be a smidgeon with his 'pop' songs. The darkness of their music is what has drawn a lot of people to them (including me!). Taking into account the whole bleak package, the darkest imo would be Animals.

[danielcaux]

That's not completely true. Before the dark side era the glimmers of joy in Pink Floyd music were more frequent, and also after Waters left the band the music and themes became more positive and life affirming, away from the dark side so to speak. Stuff like Learning To Fly, One Slip, On The Turning Away, Take It Back... and before those: Fat Old Sun, Pillow Of Winds, St. Tropez, Green Is The Colour, Grantchester Meadows...

a shelter from pigs on the wing

is the most telling IMHO.

The pigs on the wing (or 'when pigs fly' which means something that is highly unlikely to happen) is the act of surprise.
So again it says to me that hes settling for something sure and steady and not passionate or volatile.

Hhmm, I've always interpreted that line in a different way. The pigs on the wing for me are the title characters from Pigs 3DO, the tyrants who are "on the wing", that is flying on a power trip, and who might shit down on you, making your life miserable. That's why one would need "a shelter from pigs on the wing", and perhaps someone to share it. Sometimes even that special someone IS actually the shelter from all that is crooked and wrong in the world.

[my breakfast.]

I find the darkest and happiest albums to have nothing to do with the lyrics on each album. I'm pretty unimpressed with Roger's lyrics on the later albums. I'm not saying they are bad, just that they get far too much attention for their rather basic nature and their rather lumpy rhyme scheme.

The darkest album for me is the More album. Animals and The Wall might deal with darker themes but 1) the lyrics ruin it with their turgid prose and 2) the music is all wrong given that The Wall is almost a work of bad theatre and Animals doesn't rock nearly as hard as it thinks it does.

More is different. More was written late enough that the band had actually all pretty much experimented with drugs but had failed to spread their dung too lightly as they did on Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mothers (where the spec was written for them to produce long works to keep up with their peers rather than they actually play what they want to play). Enough bootleg material exists to indicate that a lot of More existed in their live regime prior to recording, so it wasn't all cooked up to meet the demands of the film. Also because of the sheer lack of fidelity on the mix of More it has its own suffocating style that makes it more entrapping when you listen to it. Everything is washed in archaic reverb effects. Listen to it on a good stereo and it sounds worse! DSOTM was meant for audiophiles, and a whole culture of getting stoned and watching the Pink Floyd lazor show was borne from that ethos of Pink Floyd being a high fidelity band. More is different because it is so murky, tinny, rattly and dampened that it sounds like a bad trip! Many of the album cuts are a little too creatively sparse to be worth repeated listens, but Cirrus Minor, Cymbaline, Green is the Colour, Main Theme and Up the Khyber all get the work done. For a shitty soundtrack album it is amazing how much of it was used by the Floyd in concert for the next two years. Cymbaline became its own concert monster, a little like Dark Star for the Grateful Dead, but on the album it has its own atmosphere. On the album cut we have the hand percussion and the piano, which should make it feel lighter but with that dense reverb, isolated stereo panning and dampened sound it all seems like bad news. A nightmare in wonderland, if you will. This atmosphere soaks into much of the album, right down to the cover art of a tourist trap windmill dodged and burned into a horrible bright orange nightmare as if some acid head was burning up in a tropical paradise.


As for happiest it would have to be Piper. If you knew nothing of the Syd Barrett saga or the power play within the band throughout their career, you would regard Piper as the work of four young guys getting to put their wildest creations down on tape with as much free will as can be reasonably entrusted with musicians. On cuts like Interstellar and Stethoscope the band jam and anti-jam to their hearts' content whilst somehow chipping out the basic pattern for spacerock as it is most widely recognised. On the Gnome and Scarecrow they are allowed to dip into a certain whimsy that lies in the same English folk music that Benjamin Britten and Petter Pears imagined in a classical setting through the use of traditional folk melodies, relating to a time in English history of rural agricultural tradition that never really existed but would also powered some of Genesis' first albums (I Know What I Like!). A band with one eye on the space travel that was becoming a political keystone in the '60s and another eye on the rich past of their home country (that was being ignored largely except Traffic and Ray Davis' slightly more cynical take on Getting It Together In the Country) were hot stuff! Every album since Piper was a compromise as the band became more painfully self aware, more restricted by a culture of the music business and more jaded by extensive touring to audiences who were listening less and less.

[rememberaday]

Every album since Piper was a compromise as the band became more painfully self aware, more restricted by a culture of the music business and more jaded by extensive touring to audiences who were listening less and less.

Well the concept of Ummagumma came pretty close, but I think the Floyd just blew that chance and restrained a bit on that record. That did, however, have a sort of appeal; how many popular bands do you get that are as restricted as Floyd are?

[my breakfast.]

Popular band have always been restricted by their intended market (and their actual market, which can sometimes fail to overlap if you consider that Nirvana wanted the adulation of the underground SST punk types but instead became a grudgingly mainstream rawk band and you can buy their T-shirts in the kids section of several highstreet shops now...).

I digress. I made my comments about More and Piper when I had had quite a lot of red wine.

Piper I singled out because of how young the band was. I think with that age comes a certain self confidence in their abilities that evaporated away towards 1969. Just look at their dress code. By 1969 they were all wearing drab and dark clothing and Roger played half of each gig with his back to the audience locked into some weird ritual with Nick Mason. When it comes to Set the Controls he takes off his bass and tiptoes up to the microphone with little to no self confidence, one finger jabbed in his ear to make sure he wasn't singing off pitch and occasionally giving evil glares. Even with the Syd lineup he was the big tall guy thrashing his Rickenbacker bass with a wee bit too much angst for a supposed hippie... however he was happy to put one zany song on Piper and A Saucerful each, which suggests he had some faith in his early songwriting capabilities that also dried up for a while.

Ummagumma, for me, is the band trying to tap into a more intellectually highbrow Stockhausen level of music. They had the idea to record individual tracks first and then had to write the music to spec, which seems the wrong way round to me. They weren't just jamming away for the hell of it, Roger had his tape machine stuff he was experimenting with together with Ron Geesin, Dave had his CSNY sort of thing, Rick tries to write modern classical music (complete with jarring piano solo) and Nick again messes around with tape machines, all of which is tied up with slightly pretentious titles.

[Mike Eder]

I think of Piper is a very happy album. Saucerful, Atom Heart, Meddle, and Obscured By Clouds as being generally upbeat, but with somber moments. Animals, The Wall, and The Final Cut, are very dark. More, Ummagumma, Dark Side, Wish You Were Here, I think of as downbeat wih some moments of joy. MLOR and Division try to be a blend, but there is too little emotion to feel much of anything.

[rememberaday]

AMLOR is generic 80's music for me, and TDB generic 90's music for me (excluding High Hopes of course).

[space triangle]

Old thread

To me 'Animals' is darkest, 'Meddle' is happiest.

[azza200]

Yet Another Movie is one of the darkest songs from AMLOR along with Sorrow

[space triangle]

Yet Another Movie is one of the darkest songs from AMLOR along with Sorrow

AMLOR is it darkest Pink Floyd album in your opinion?

[Eclipse]

The album that most conveys "happiness" to me is Piper. The darkness one, for me, is The Wall.

[Gslatner]

Piper is by far the happiest and it’s a toss up between Animals, The Wall, and The Final Cut for darkest. Roger just kept getting darker and darker and really did start to alienate the Floyd fans that weren’t so miserable.

[azza200]

Yet Another Movie is one of the darkest songs from AMLOR along with Sorrow

AMLOR is it darkest Pink Floyd album in your opinion?

no those 2 songs from the album are rather dark & bkeakest imo I would say Animals is the darkest album