UMMAGUMMA

Close your eyes, open your ears. What do you see, black. What do you hear, a legion of your very own thoughts, circling your head as your past memories and emotions are summoned. If you are smart you are listening to prog, and if you are wise you are listening to Ummagumma, by Pink Floyd. Ummagumma will not only scare you away from it after the first intimidating listen, but it will cause your head to feel these bizarre and frightening emotions and thoughts. Ummagumma will evoke a hostile black in your eyes, a black of many shades. A black of the smoke from Hell in "Sysyphus". A black for the uncharted outer-galactic regions of space in "Astronomy Domine". Or perhaps a black resembling the murkey lands explored by Nick Mason in his "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party". What ever black you see, and what ever thoughts are summoned in your head by this album, just remember that it is the very best Pink Floyd has to offer, pre-Dark Side or not, it is the absolute best of Pink Floyd.

Ummagumma is a double album, consisting of one live disk, one studio disk, and alltogether eight mini-epic songs. The album name sounds like something a witch would say just before her spell would take effect and turn you into a primal spiked beast who's only purpose is to torture with sharp claws and tusks. Upon close inspection, the seemingly simple album cover is truly haunting, disturbingly moving, mind boggling and is only a stroke of genius in this painting of an album. Look at Dave's face on the front of the cover, it's almost as if he is trying to tell you to beware before entering. I'm sure even he was bewildered when he heard the final product. It took quite a surprising amount of skill to match so perfectly the cover art to the music caged within. And that is deffinetly something Pink Floyd have aquired now, is skill. Skillful playing, skillful writing, skillful cooporation when live on stage, and a skillful amount of improvement from their last studio A Saucerful of Secrets. It seems Pink Floyd fit almost perfectly into the progressive section of music, hmm... imagine that.

All four songs on the live album are amazing. No slow blues here, just mind altering space rock jams that set the standard for live prog. Each of them are leaps beyond their studio versions that were already very good. "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" is my absolute favorite on the entire double album, and one of my favorites in all the Floyd catologue. The song really is the most perfect example of a rise, climax, and descend. Each section equally entertaining. It's no wonder they perfected the song's dinamic changes, section lengths, and emotion considering three of them came from an architectual school. The song is really a monument that architectual musicians should be required to study if they wish to construct such a song.

Dave justifies his stay in the band and Nick is a bomb just waiting to go off. You never know when the dam* guy is gonna kick it up a dozen notches and actually play some really entertaining rythyms that can get a little tricky at times. The guy may be preety predictable in that studio room behind his drum set, but on stage he really is someone else, putting whatever he can into the music to make you say, "Wow, I wonder how they came up with that idea?", or even make you head bang while bashing imaginary drums in the air. I love Rick in the studio during the 60's so it's needless of me to say he is my favorite live. He isn't fast or unpredictable here, but not to worry, he is really touching with his chords, solo's and melodies. Roger is nothing special with instuments live, but I'm sure he wrote a good amount of the new sections to the live versions, so he did his fair share. Singing though, he can really get in touch with Syd's voice on "Astronomy Domine", especially at the end when him and Rick sing together during that last verse.

Well, I'm sure the live album didn't scare you away like I said the studio would, so don't think you got out of the best part yet. As if the live album weren't mind blowing enough, they throw in another four, this time studio, mini-epics to scare you off.

I like to think of the studio pieces as all one piece, each with their own sections. Don't believe the album and think that Dave's contribution is three connected songs, it is really one song. Roger's two contributions are one song as well. Same with Rick, and the same with Nick. Think of each member's addition as each way you can write a mini-epic. Nick's aproach is to have the main piece bookend by and intro and end. Hey didn't we see the very same thing in the album Animals' layout, ya Pig's on the Wing was a bookend, and that worked perfectly, but somehow many people don't see this and blame Nick for writing rubbish on Ummagumma, and contributing nothing to Animals. Both statements are indeed wrong. Dave chose to have his mini-epic open with an instrumental, then go to an opposite style of playing, then have it go to a nice blues song. Roger chose to write about nature, how it can either be heavenly peacefull, or appocaliptic and scary. He is brilliant for how he chose to switch from one half of his mini-epic to the next, by swatting that fly. Rick's mini-epic has many styles and goes from one to the other rather forcefully, not as flowing as Dave, but I see it as a good thing and just another way this album is so conflicting with itself. It never repeats anything, everything conflicts.

The studio efforts may seem "inferior", "unfocused" or even as claimed by the Roger, "Utter peices of s**t" but that is only at a first glance. This is another heavily overlooked prog album to the fullest extent of the meaning so it deserves just as much attention as any prog album. I'm sure the reason this wonderful album is overlooked so badly is because the studio side seems like meaningless experimentation that should have been collaborated on. I thought the very same thing too at one point, and I was never more wrong in my life. The studio side is much more focused with only one writer per song. It gives it that unchallenged direction that the other members would have misguided. I promise Dave would have put Roger's song on the wrong path if he added anything, Roger knew where to take it, and it went even beyond it's destination.

Think about it, how can the studio side truly be unfocussed if each song is written and played alone? If they really did collaborate the album would be less than half as good. Each member knew what they themselve's wanted to do, and if any of the other members tried to add more to the other's song, then the song would lose much of it's meaning and soul. What could Roger have done to Sysyphus, really? Rick captures the emotion of the song's intent perfectly, there is no way Roger could have depicted life in Hell in the story of Sysyphus any better than it was portrayed by Rick. Rick really shows us his creative, classical, progressive, intelligent and angry side in his four part mini-epic.

Roger finally beats Simon and Garfunkle at their own game with peaceful songs about nature. This song especially shows the production improvement from their last album, the birds are crystal clear, and Roger's voice is like an angel on your shoulder wispering in your ear, you can practically feel his breath on you! However this utter bliss is creatively ended once the seemingly peaceful man swats a poor innocent fly. We soon recieve an instrumental featuring nothing but sound effects and voices put in directions unknown to the unprogressive part of society. At one point Roger's noises and voices are like instruments playing a song, but to soon does it go from instruments to hundreds of scurrying creatures running to produce more chaos in an already anarchic forest. I don't want to talk to much about Dave's mini- epic. I love his but much has already been said and I think Nick's is more important to explain.

Nick decides to open and close with beautiful flute peices that work great for the song, and the ending of the album. Here's something I know that no-one noticed before. At the start of the second movement, the flute part is reversed backwards, BUT the reversed flute part is exactly the same as Rick's melody in movement one of Sysyphus. Whether this was intentional or not I have no idea, but that just goes to show how undeservingly Nick's contribution gets overlooked. Nick really spices the track up with a atmospheric melotron part too. The battle section right after is more interesting once you learn to pay attention you ADD'ers. A lick will be played on the right ear, and then the left ear will play it very simily but with subtle differences, and it's so cool one it gets to the climax and the left and right ear get faster and more precise and then comes a jaw-droping drum solo.

I rambled quite a bit, but I hope you read it all and know that this album is really serious, it's not just some random playing around in a studio with 100% experimentation kind of album. Listen to it alot, it takes a while, but you will soon see you own favorite subtlies to the album, live and studio sides, that make you never want to visit the After Dark Side era of Floyd again. To much emotion and genius was put into this album for it to be thrown aside. For those of you that only like it some, but not as much as I do, give it more time and attention, It is my favorite double album, even ahead of Yes' Tales From Topographic Oceans, which is another 5 star double album. I could have written a whole lot more, but I'll spare you, I'm sure you've suffered enough through my insane ramblings, but I guarantee that the songs are anything but insane ramblings. This album is only for prog lovers so don't venture into it and come out thinking it's crap. This should be the last Floyd album you check out because of it's difficulty to get into.

Enjoy it, I know I do.

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