I think I spotted some Floydish piano work in Routine, from the Hand. Cannot. Erase. album. The central concept of the album is again Roger-ish in that there's a strong central lyrical concept, a story is told like that of Billy or certain hitch-hikers. But, different as the lyrics are very non-Roger in style. E.g.
"Hand Cannot Erase"
Together we have this love
Even so it's not enough
Bruised and burned we won't lose heart
And just because life gets hard
Writing lying e-mails to our friends back home
Feeling guilty if we sometimes wanna be alone
Hand cannot erase this love
Hand cannot erase this love
And a love like this makes us strong
We laugh it off if things go wrong
It's not you, forgive me if i find i need more space
Cause trust means we don't have to be together everyday
Hand cannot erase this love
Hand cannot erase this love
Hand cannot erase this love
Hand cannot erase this love
These are IMHO closer to Dave/Polly lyrics than Rog lyrics.
EDIT: These lyrics are first person. Does Roger write in first person? I think he writes in second person a lot. (I need to think about this more, but I can certainly think of many Roger songs that use the second person 'you'.) EDIT: Quite a lot of first person lyrics in The Wall. - I'm talking to myself here and should stop
EDIT: I can't think of any music more 70s Floydian than Tales of Mystery and Imagination by the Alan Parsons Project.
Annoying Twit wrote:But, different as the lyrics are very non-Roger in style. E.g.
"Hand Cannot Erase"
Together we have this love
Even so it's not enough
Bruised and burned we won't lose heart
And just because life gets hard
Writing lying e-mails to our friends back home
Feeling guilty if we sometimes wanna be alone
Hand cannot erase this love
Hand cannot erase this love
And a love like this makes us strong
We laugh it off if things go wrong
It's not you, forgive me if i find i need more space
Cause trust means we don't have to be together everyday
Hand cannot erase this love
Hand cannot erase this love
Hand cannot erase this love
Hand cannot erase this love
These are IMHO closer to Dave/Polly lyrics than Rog lyrics.
True, bute there are also some very Roger-esque lyrics in there too. Per instance 'Home Invasion':
Download sex and download God
Download the funds to meet the cost
Download a dream home and a wife
Download the ocean and the sky
Another day on Earth has passed me by
But I have lost all faith in what's outside
The awning of the stars across the sky
And the wreckage of the night
Download love and download war
Download the shit you didn't want
Download the things that make you mad
Download the life you wish you had
Hudini wrote:
True, bute there are also some very Roger-esque lyrics in there too. Per instance 'Home Invasion':
Download sex and download God
Download the funds to meet the cost
Download a dream home and a wife
Download the ocean and the sky
Another day on Earth has passed me by
But I have lost all faith in what's outside
The awning of the stars across the sky
And the wreckage of the night
Download love and download war
Download the shit you didn't want
Download the things that make you mad
Download the life you wish you had
Yeah, I noticed those after I had posted the above. But, I thought it excessive navel-gazing to go and modify my post yet again Off to listen to Tales of Mystery and Imagination again to check its Floydness.
EDIT: 'The Tell-Tale Heart' - how Floydian is that!?!? (rhetoric question - very Floydian IMHO.)
Funny thing (if others agree), some of the songs could fit best on The Wall, even though that wasn't released until years after ToM&I. E.g. 'The Cask Of Amontillado'.
I don't know Radiohead well. Which album of original compositions is most Floyd-like?
Alan Parsons Project: I Robot. Less Floyd like than ToM&I. The opening and ending instrumentals being most like Floyd I think. APP was going in their own direction with the inclusion of more funky influences, particularly on "I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You". Still more Floydian than most bands said to be Floydian, IMHO.
Annoying Twit wrote:EDIT: I can't think of any music more 70s Floydian than Tales of Mystery and Elimination by the Alan Parsons Project.
As for the "Tales of Mystery and Imagination", I agree it's very Floydian sounding album. All the lush, dreamy, otherworldly atmospheric elements of Dark Side Of The Moon are present on the "Tales..". And, Alan Parsons successfully repeated the crystal clear sound quality of the DarkSide too.
PS: Debut album by Soft Machine(from 1968) is a very much 'Syd Barrett-Pink Floyd' sounding. It's really no big surprise, because of they used to share the bill with Pink Floyd all the time at the UFO and the Marquee Club in early days.
Annoying Twit wrote:BTW: How did my post change to 'Tales of Mystery and Elimination' in your quote?
I really have no idea how and why you post changed to 'Tales of Mystery and Elimination'! It's weird.
I quoted you post normally and....I just don't know what's happened.
Paul McCartney has said several times over the years that he always saw Pink Floyd as The Beatles' natural successor, in terms of using the studio as an instrument and pushing the limits of what could be achieved. The Beatles had strong personalities, and Pink Floyd certainly did as well, so it can get tricky when comparing bands that have come along since then, when we might be inclined to identify them by the individual members more than by their style and methods. With that said, I think it's fair to say that Radiohead is really the only group that can be considered as Pink Floyd's successor; there was a lot of that sort of talk following the release of OK Computer, and Gilmour admitted he was a fan, but they pushed back at the idea of being a "boring rock band", preferring to think of themselves as artists. It's the kind of snooty thing Roger would've done in the early '70s... "Give a man a synthesizer and an amplifier and he doesn't become us!"
Pink Floyd doesn't sound like The Beatles, and Radiohead doesn't sound like Pink Floyd. I don't love everything Radiohead has done, though I have seen them live a few times - their In Rainbows tour was particularly good. There was a time when I could see Coldplay reaching the level of something like Dark Side of the Moon, prior to their involvement with Brian Eno - which was especially disappointing since I've always wanted to see Eno and Gilmour work together (so Roger Eno turning up on Rattle That Lock was a surprise twist!). On X&Y, the writing was simple and direct, and most of it was quite good, and paired with music that was equally simple and effective. As much as I love Brian Eno's own albums, as a producer he's essentially the opposite of Bob Ezrin - he encouraged them to make the lyrics more specific and "vivid", and made the music much more complicated as well, resulting in a lot of rambling, over-the-top pop music. Though he only produced one of their albums, their style really seems to have shifted from that point on, though there were a few tracks on Ghost Stories that were fairly Floydish.
Another band that I've hoped would really hit their stride and make a truly great album is Doves. Some Cities is my favorite of theirs so far, but they just put out their first new album in 11 years, and I haven't spent enough time with it to have an opinion. The funny thing is, Dark Side of the Moon was Pink Floyd's 8th studio album; Radiohead, Coldplay, and Doves have only released 9, 8, and 5, respectively, even though they've all been around for over 20 years. Nils Frahm, on the other hand, who is a keyboardist that makes some very Floydian music, has released 11 instrumental albums, 7 EPs, several soundtracks, and a bunch of collaborations, all since 2005. We'd all prefer quality over quantity, but the amount of work that led up to Pink Floyd's eventual success is probably only matched by David Bowie (Let's Dance was his 15th album, for chrissake).
And another thing! We'll never hear another band whose main influences are Duke Ellington, The Shadows, and John Cage - and if we do, they won't sound anything like Pink Floyd. They were somehow a rock band that listened to anything but rock. Any artist that somehow sounds like them now would have to have an extremely limited range of influences - maybe someone like Roger Waters, who hasn't listened to other people's music since 1985 (unless you count The Division Bell). It will always be easy to spot Pink Floyd's influence, but we'll only get it in bits and pieces or else it will be too derivative.
I have listened to most of Porcupine Tree/Steven Wilson's catalog, chronologically of course, due to how often he gets mentioned by Floyd fans...the very early stuff that had him playing just about everything was almost a carbon copy of Floyd circa 1969, down to rubbing the strings with a guitar slide. The sound definitely changed once he brought other people in, but there's really nothing that distinguishes those later albums from many other albums that were coming out around the same time by bands like Doves and Leaves. Even the fairly recent Hand Cannot Erase sounds much more like David Bowie's Hours... album from 1999, and displays about the same amount of Pink Floyd's influence. https://youtu.be/CP8VrVo9Io0
It's weird. 