A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS

I've always regarded A Saucerful of Secrets to be a classic psychedelic rock album, with a lot of variety of sounds and writing approaches, and a very progressive album structure. There's "Jugband Blues", another totally unique Syd Barrett song that sounds almost nothing like anything on The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, the opening "Let There Be More Light", with its exciting ride cymbal and bass propulsion that gives way to a laid back, stony verse/dramatic blast chorus alternation, "Corporal Clegg", a Waters song that shows he had a penchant for wittilly and effectively speaking out against war early on, two very memorable Wright songs ("Remember a Day" and "See-Saw") that both serve as great examples of his sombre, and vivid style that alawys seemed to vary just slightly with each song, and the title track, a highly spacey instrumental, and the beginning of a long string of extended compositions by the band that would merge improvisational atmospheres with deceptively complex writing structures that probably served as wonderful accompaniments to head trips for many new to the psychedelic scene in the 60's and early 70's. I would imagine they'd probably still serve as that today as well. David Gilmour's guitar style has evolved very gracefully through Pink Floyd's and his solo career, and at this point, he sounds very much like Syd Barrett, employing chillingly similar delay and reverb shapes and spacey slide freak-outs, as he was supposedly meant to be a direct replacement for him on stage and learned all the orginal parts for the songs on the first album, but there are some places where he sounds like no one else, including himself on any other albums, like the extremely loud wailing explosions in "Corporal Clegg," and legendarily speaking, both Gilmour and Barrett played on the hypnotic and suspensefully quiet "Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun." Rick Wright had also grown as a keyboardist, adding delicate and symphonic piano runs and some very cool warped effects to some of the organ parts. Norman Smith's excellently psych production heightens the expeirence of all of these sounds, and even though the band is said to resent the space rock label often given to them, their second album is one of the greatest in the genre. It is also here that Pink Floyd start to make use of their supply of multiple lead vocalists, a strength that would be a defining characterstic for them for the duration of their discography.