Pink Floyd worst to first album ranking

15) The Final Cut

14) Ummagumma

13) Endless River

12) More

11) Momentary Lapse of Reason

10) A Saucerful of Secrets

9) Piper at the Gates of Dawn

8) Atom Heart Mother

7) Division Bell

6) Obscured by Clouds

5) Animals

4) Meddle

3) The Dark Side of the Moon

2) Wish You Were Here

1) The Wall (Yes, DSOTM and WYWH are objectively better, but I like The Wall more

I think thats a little bit unfair.   You dont have to be into every single music style a band has ever done.   Sometimes bands go in directions to genres of music your not really into.

Its like im a big fan of Savatage the prog metal band, but im not much of a fan of Savatage the traditional heavy metal band.   Hall of the Mountain King in my opinion is their only "good" album from that era.   Power of The Night is not too bad i guess, but Sirens, Fight For The Rock and Dungeons Are Calling, not a fan of at all.  Nearly all Paradise Lost fans arnt too crazy about the album Believe In Nothing.

Coldplay have 2 era's to them aswell.  Before 2010 they were more like early Radiohead, but after that year they went more pop rock where i dont think that era is as good.   On their latest album however, on its final track, they had a go at a prog rock style song, and ill give them their dues, they didnt do a bad job of it.

OK, I just updated in Gnosis mt News From Babel rating from 9 & 10 to 10 & 11 repectively, because I just referred to Gnosis to see the year 1984 for the 1984 poll PP bumped a few minutes ago. I did so, because the first NFB album seemed drowned in a sea of average albums at a G9 grade, something it did not deserve, IMHO. It's much more fitting with a Gnosis 10, IMHO. Their second (with Wyett on vocals) is much better, and merited to be featured atop 1986 and with a 11, it achieved that (86 is a relatively poor year - one of the poorest, FTM)

Stressed Cheese wrote: Sean Trane wrote: I would say that until Waters left, Floyd was probably the most innovative band, reinventing itself systematically with each new album, yet remaining totally Floydish at first listen. Not one album sounded the same or was a repeat of the former. Can't say that of Yes, Genesis, Crimson , GG, VdGG, Zappa, etc...  I don't know. I think their albums from 1971-1975 don't really evolve that much. Not to say they didn't grow at all, but I'd say that even something like Crimson changed more from, say, Poseidon to Red, than Floyd did in from Meddle to Wish. Zappa only really didn't change as much from album to album because he wrote so much stuff that a single "era" or style could easily fill at least 2, if not more albums. So if you control for the sheer amount Zappa released and the relatively small amount of albums Floyd released, Zappa easily wins in versatility/innovation. And hey, don't say they didn't innovate after Waters left! They took a big, big turn when he left: they became boring.

What I meant is that the ambiance on everyone of their 70's albums are very different as they progressed from a happy-hippie soundtrack (More & AHM) to an oppressive doom soundscape (Animals, Wall, TFC). Of course this is also linked to Waters taking the control of the lyrics, and in doing so, modified the rest of the band's sonics. Waters recently claimed to have mainly written DSOTM and to a lesser extent WYWH, and he's not wrong, because of the critics on society and their own surroundings: the mood changes drastically from OFTD, Echoes, Pillow & Fearless on Meddle to DSOTM's Time, Money, U&T, and Brain Damage and later on Shine On You and Welcome to The Machine. Let's not forget either, that Dogs & Sheep also date from the WYWH recording sessions (just like The Wall's Run Like Hell sounds very much like it belonged on Animals).

Furthermore, Floyd has many works on the first part of the decade which remains relatively obscure (and therefore unknown to the masses, because never officially releawsed), such as like tracks like Embryo or Cymbalene (the extended version), the Roland Petit Ballet (between Meddle and DSOTM) and The Man & The Journey suite.

TOP

Animals - 15

WYWH - 14

DSOTM - 13

(Ummagumma Live - 13)

Piper - 13

MID

Atom Heart Mother - 12

Meddle - 12

Ummagumma - 11 ((13 + 8) / 2 = 10.5 ~= 11)

Secrets in a Saucer - 11

LOW

Clouds - 9

More - 8

(Ummagumma Studio - 8)

The Wall - 7

Final Cut - 4

Might seem a bit harsh for The Final Cut, but according to the Gnosis rating system, everything 5 and above can't be called "bad" and TFC is bad, so.  A 4 still corresponds to a 2-star album on PA, so I'm being generous, if anything. But both it and The Wall are due some relistens, so who knows, could go up a bit. Or down!

On the topic of this whole Gnosis rating stuff. I'd come across it but never really looked at it, but I like this system...I'd tried to come up with something similar (and always thought a 15-point scale was great), in case I ever make more of an effort to review stuff, but this should do. I have some thoughts, though.

First of all, a rating of 9 apparentely indicates a "pretty good" album that's "better than most", but it also says, one "may or may not keep" an album with a rating of 9. Why would you not keep a pretty good album that's better than most? That's a bit silly. Second, if you don't use ratings of 15, and everyone's free to decide that for themselves, of course, but a 14 effectively becomes the highest grade, and so a 14/14. Again, it's fine, but why not give a 15 to that select group albums that you'd take on a hypothetical desert island?

Greenmist wrote: Why do a fair amont of people here think Ummagumma is a top album?, i am honestly baffed by that one.  Most of the songs on this album just sound like ambient movie scene music.   Usually when i wanna listen to music i dont stick on a movie soundtrack if the soundtrack is pretty much just all ambient atmospherics from individual scenes, this is why i know i wont return to Ummagumma much.

This is a really interesting take. I don't fully agree, but I certainly see where you're coming from. I'd say AHM is where you see the band grappling with their pyschedelic/experimental urges and a desire to create a more polished final product. That of course reaches its apex with DSotM, which I do think for all of its musical conservatism is still breaking norms in its use of the studio. DSotM is one of the first and, to this day, best attempts at creating a fully immersive, cohesive, pseudo-cinematic experience on record. Of course, once they cracked that particular nut it was for the most part diminishing returns (for pure personal enjoyment Animals is my go-to, but I can't for a second pretend they're doing anything new on that one).

This is the forum of a progressive music site: it's normal that The Piper is not the forumists' favourite album.

But, from the point of view of musical history, Pink Floyd never wrote a more revolutionary album than The Piper. In particular, the track Interstellar Overdrive alone is worth a rock band's career. Wanting to associate it with A Sauceful of Secrets, I think I can say that from Atom Heart Mother onwards, thus including TDSOTM and WYWH, Pink Floyd have musically become a reactionary band.

I'm talking about music, not lyrics, about the musical impact on an era: nothing is better than the first album, and at most the second. The albums of the seventies may appeal more to a prog fan, they may be more elaborate and complex in sound and composition, they may constitute summits of high quality, but the suites of AHM, TDSOTM and WYWH are very cerebral, very reassuring, very captivating, they want to seduce with a melodic, slow and sumptuous style, completely planned: they are the opposite of being transgressive, excessive, revolutionary, the opposite of Interstellar Overdrive where disorder and improvisation reign. The psychedelic revolution had already passed.

Technically, there is more crud than quality in the world of pop music 
 Sooooo, TBH, I tend to think that most of the pop albums on earth are certainly below a G7 or G5 rating (the cringe  comes at G4 and below, IMHO), but I haven't 90% heard them, or if I did, I haven't cared to rate them. 

That said, my overall Gnosis rating frequency from 15 to 1 is more of Gauss curve on a graph (frequency of occurrence being the Y axis and Gnosis rates being the X-axis), with most of my Gnosis ratings being 9, 8, 7 and 6 (technically I view that as PA3 and PA2). 

And yessss, not using a G15 is a luxury I can afford, given the 15 scale. 

Not even sure I could spare a space like that on a 10 scale. 

I guess that most other "Gnostics" also have the same Gauss curve, though I suspect often a "skewed bell"  shape (meaning skewed towards the top ratings), because most members only care to rate the stuff they love or remember well - rather than understandably focus on the bad stuff. 

In other words, I tend to rate from the middle of the scale, rather than from the top of the scale. 

Perfection is not of this world, mon ami. 

BTW, I have +/- 100 Gnosis 13 and 350 Gnosis 12 (1.3% and 4.5% respectively)

I kind of wear it as a badge of honour, to be one of the most severe rater  on the Gnosis site. 

Here is my Gnosis 14: (shoot me, no Genesis, Yes, ELP, King Crimson, etc...)

Greenmist wrote: Why do a fair amont of people here think Ummagumma is a top album?, i am honestly baffed by that one.  Most of the songs on this album just sound like ambient movie scene music.   Usually when i wanna listen to music i dont stick on a movie soundtrack if the soundtrack is pretty much just all ambient atmospherics from individual scenes, this is why i know i wont return to Ummagumma much.

I can't speak for others and I haven't even posted a ranking, however in my view the live album is the absolutely best thing they released; you need to "get" psychedelic experimentation, get into the flow, reach imaginary landscapes that are only open to us through music (some have chemical alternatives but I'm not one of them ). Pink Floyd in the old days became a legend as a live band and would use their material freely, providing a different trip every time. They did many things that hadn't been done before, and definitely broadened the horizon of rock music big time. The Ummagumma live album is a great document of that, the best that we have of one of the best bands in the world at full power. Obviously one can discuss the rating of something that is built on older material, but for me this is the essential Pink Floyd. The second album is very good in places and fun in others, I listen to it with curiosity and can appreciate it, even though I agree that quite a bit of it hasn't that much relistening value. I'm generally always curious what can be done in music, what sounds can be used and how, and they did much exploration here, even if maybe not all of it successful. You've got to appreciate experimentation and not doing things as the mainstream thinks they have to be done. I think I'd give it a 13, 15 coming from the live album.

I've not used a Gnosis 15 so far and have only used the Gnosis 14 only 13 times, which gives me 0% and 0.08% respectively, out of +/- 8000 ratings.

But yes, getting a 5 is much easier than a Gnosis 15. 

FTM, a PA5 is equivalent to a G15+G14+G13 

and a PA4 is equivalent to a G12+G11+G10

Greenmist wrote: Why do a fair amont of people here think Ummagumma is a top album?, i am honestly baffed by that one.  Most of the songs on this album just sound like ambient movie scene music.   Usually when i wanna listen to music i dont stick on a movie soundtrack if the soundtrack is pretty much just all ambient atmospherics from individual scenes, this is why i know i wont return to Ummagumma much.

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