MEDDLE

Pink Floyd has always been ahead of it's time with sound and production. For 1971, I find Meddle a masterpiece of psychedelic rock with great compositions and diversity, and a great balance between euphoria and anxiety. There are five tracks in total each one sliding from numbness to relaxation, almost encouraging you to dance but only to end up with a huge echo.

One of These Days is a typical Pink Floyd track, you can recognise it from a mile off. Synthesised keys create this, how to call it, almost underwater acoustic environment that is at any point ready to explode. When this happens, the conventional instruments start playing their sets out of which I dare put emphasis on the two guitars that communicate very well using scratchy riffs. Pink Floyd is a very influential band which is why I shall point out what bands followed the same musical approach. In this case I would name Riverside.

A Pillow of Winds really takes off with a melodic assembly of acoustic guitars. The voice is candid as usual. Just the kind of track you often hear on Porcupine Tree albums such as Lightbulb Sun.

The next song, Fearless, continues the softness line of the previous one, only this time you are so far high in the sky you cannot see the ground any more.

San Tropez, with it's jazzy piano and country style acoustic guitar, kind of a makes me dance around. It's amazing how a simple song like this one (there is absolutely nothing special about any of the patters of any instrument and the entire assembly is as common as it gets, I wouldn't even mention the piano solo) can impress this much.

Seamus is more like an interlude that has a country style, actually being of a more old-fashioned one than San Tropez.

After three songs of relaxation, the band decides to close the circle by returning to the melancholic style of the first track, proposing a very abstract piece of music - Echoes. Although long, it's not boring at all, but slow and profound and the sound twists it's self creating multiple types of atmosphere. What comes after is more likely experimental than psychedelic but it never leaves the roots of what Pink Floyd is known for behind.

This was my first Pink Floyd album, I enjoyed it from the start and in spite the fact that I like it very much, 5 stars would be inappropriate. Except Echoes there seems to be too much simplicity in the other four tracks.