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Top 5 Underrated Pink Floyd Albums

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Click below to hear the author read this post on our SoundCloud. And yes, we know these albums aren’t underrated by true fans.


Pink Floyd sold over 250 million albums since releasing Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967. Most sales are for latter day masterpieces Dark Side of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall, but they have a body of creative output worth mining beyond these. In fact, I’ve grown to favor some of these Top 5 Underrated Pink Floyd Albums over their more popular work.

Subtle changes in lineup make Pink Floyd three different bands depending on the era. I’m not alone in favoring 1969-1985 roster Waters, Wright, Mason and Gilmour, though much can be said of the history and music pre and post this era. Read drummer Nick Mason’s book Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd for that.

Let’s get to this.

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a-saucerful-of-secrets-front-image-courtesy-of-emi-records5. A Saucerful of Secrets
1968, Produced by Norman Smith
Recorded at Abbey Road, London


Most people know the Floyd through songs like Comfortably Numb off 1979’s The Wall. Is there a more iconic guitar solo in Rock? Debatable, yes, but miles away from their psychedelic, free-jazz, and improvisational roots – inspired as they were by noise-bands like AMM. I put some AMM on the other day and creeped around the apartment spying on my girl. She did NOT dig it.

 Saucerful of Secrets is the sound of a band finding a voice without Syd.

After releasing Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a milestone in psychedelic music, the band found itself in a pickle when key singer/songwriter Syd Barrett dropped too much acid and became a shadow of his former self. For most of its running length, Saucerful of Secrets is the sound of a band finding a voice without Syd.

Fans of later records will not automatically like this one. It’s not the kind of record you’d put on at a party and expect everyone to dig. Not unless it’s the late sixties, and it’s that kinda party. I’m saying if you’re selling hot-dogs from a cart, blast a different record from the radio.

The album opens with the visceral Let There Be More Light, Waters’ bassline making way for newbie Dave Gilmour, hired to fill in the gaps caused by Barrett’s breakdown. Let There Be More Light succeeds in aping some of Syd’s bombast and sci-fi leanings while pointing to a more terrestrial future.

There’s an effortlessness to Saucerful of Secrets in slow moments that build steam and ultimately let loose, like the psychedelic spaghetti western Remember a Day and early concert staple Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. I don’t think bands could get on TV with this kind of experimental material anymore. It certainly wouldn’t make it through the American Idol filter, where music is forced to sound like commercials about feelings.

 It certainly wouldn’t make it through the American Idol filter, where music is forced to sound like commercials about feelings.

Corporal Clegg is uncharacteristically catchy and Waters first foray into the World War II imagery that would inform much of his oeuvre – including The Wall and The Final Cut. Ugh, did I just use the word oeuvre?

At over 11 minutes, the sprawling title track seems influenced, perhaps, by their live shows at the UFO where the Floyd played behind projected images while London swingers tripped their balls off. The long stretches of modular noodling, intermittent pop, and abrupt shifts in mood hint at the film scores they’d record over the next few years with visionary directors like Michelangelo Antonioni.

I think Saucerful of Secrets is the reason why seasoned producer Norman Smith taught the band to record their own demos and ultimately produce their own records – something they would take to an extreme on their record Ummagumma – a self-indulgent soundscape each member produced separately with too much pot on their hands. (I still dig it.) On the other hand, they also self produced most of their best work.

Saucerful closes with Barrett’s clever sore thumb Jugband Blues, marking the end of a short-lived era. A jaunty, druggy, noisy finale to what could have been.

 

more

4. More
1969, Produced by Pink Floyd
Recorded at Pye Studios, London


This soundtrack to Barbet Shroeder’s film More is one of my go-to records. Casual fans never heard of it, but I’ve bought it on cassette, CD and two sets of remasters, so it must be one of my unconscious favorites. Yet I’ve never seen the movie. Go figure.

Green is the Colour is a hidden gem, sweet and sunny, that shows Waters stepping into his own lyrically.

Waters handles most of the writing and Gilmour all the vocals. The results are some of the most fragile and raucous music the Floyd ever stacked side by side. At the same time, there’s more of an effort to be beautiful, like in creepy cathedral opener Cirrus Minor and the melancholic Crying Song – where Gilmour foreshadows the guitar God-ery to come on later records.

There’s a lot of varied sounds here, sonically it’s all over the map. The Floyd get a little spacey in the AM radio friendly Cymbaline, a Bowie-ish track that name-drops Dr. Strange 46 years ago.

Green is the Colour is a hidden gem, sweet and sunny, that shows Waters stepping into his own lyrically. It shows a band open-minded about what they were writing and recording, not pigeon-holed into a psychedelic brand.

Heavy hung the canopy of blue / Shade my eyes and I can see you / White is the light that shines through the dress that you wore.

from Green is the Colour

The Floyd take the opportunity to rock-out uncharacteristically in the The Nile Song and minor variation Ibiza Bar – a sound they would play with the rest of their careers to underline aggression or express a release of tension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-Ma6bdFnA

There’s a distinctly late sixties palate of B-Movie Sci-Fi meets lounge-music especially in tracks like Main Theme. The Floyd imbibe other instrumentals like Up the Khyber and A Spanish Piece with some more traditional world music sounds, yet the 7 minute Quicksilver reminds us that noise-rock was not distinct to the Barrett-era. It’s a beautiful slow grinding Ed Wood fever dream with sprawling Hammond organ and trippy effects. True early seventies stoners must have spent hours staring at the record cover listening to this track.

Certainly cohesion was something they would master on later records.

For good measure, things also get a little bluesy, specifically in the instrumentals More Blues and the closer Dramatic Theme. Certainly cohesion was something they would master on later records.

More is an acquired taste for sure, and a bit more accessible than follow up Atom Heart Mother (which also has some great tunes on it).

 

pink-floyd-meddle3. Meddle
1971, Produced by Pink Floyd
Recorded at AIR, Abbey Road, Morgan Studios


Off the heels of the divisive Atom Heart Mother, the Floyd reeled it in, compacted their sound into more digestible pieces. There are 6 songs on Meddle and none of them sound like they’re from the same album.

There are 6 songs on Meddle and none of them sound like they’re from the same album.

Old school Floyd fans get their bellies rubbed up front with the double-bassed instrumental One of the These Days and again at the end with 23 minute opus Echoes, which takes up the entirety of side two, back when records had sides. Bookended in psychedelia, the middle is anything but.

They do some Meddle songs in the 1972 concert film Pink Floyd : Live from Pompeii which I fell in love with in 1987 renting the VHS tape from a local video store over and over. Most live shows are shot before cheering fans in the best arena. This one is shot in the Amphitheater of Pompeii with no audience, just the Floyd and a skeletal film crew.

If meandering psychedelia in the Italian sun is your bag, you are in luck. I love it, including Nick Mason’s This Is Spinal Tap mustache.

Strangers passing in the street / By chance two separate glances meet / And I am you and what I see is me.” – from Echoes

 A Pillow of Winds shifts things 360 degrees, the sonic equivalent of lazing about in a hammock, hearing a song from a neighbor’s radio.

An early example of the Waters/Gilmour machine, Fearless is an unappreciated track that is as good as anything Pink Floyd have ever put to tape. There’s a few tactics in this track they’d explore on Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.

Some have called San Tropez superfluous but I dig it. They played with this sound on the B-Side Bidding my Time a few years earlier. It’s an anti-Pink Floyd song, sure, but it’s Yacht Rock by guys that have owned a yacht or two. Hell, Dave still records on a houseboat. I think it’s perfectly executed, and has a decidedly English tongue in its cheek. Its got a McCartney-ish carefree attitude.

The 23 minute Echoes pings into existence from the primordial ooze like a half remembered dream. The Floyd take their time, some say self-indulgently, between movements, but there’s a song to be found inside with heavy lyrics about empathy. It gets a little funky in a 70s skin-flick kinda way before some free improv and one heroic finale.

Echoes becomes a template for how the Floyd tell a story going forward.

 

61HYrCLz0ZL._SY300_2. Animals
1977, Produced by Pink Floyd
Recorded at Brittania Row Studios, London


By now Floyd had already hit it big two albums previous with Dark Side of the Moon. Previous album Wish You Were Here is also regarded as a rock masterpiece. Two very cohesive records. Concept albums, if the term doesn’t offend you. A format Waters would work in exclusively up to an including the present.

There are allegories on Animals about humanity as dogs, pigs and sheep that you may or may not agree with, but thankfully Roger speaks his mind regardless.

Who was fitted with collar and chain / Who was given a pat on the back  / Who was breaking away from the pack  / Who was only a stranger at home

from Dogs
Opening with Pigs on the Wing (Part 1), a minute and a half of exposition. Waters bookends Animals with appeals for empathy.

If you let it, Animals will grow on you in the way the best music does – improving the more you know it. Take the track Dogs, precise not fragile, with more space between notes than usual, an efficiency to how it quiets down and snaps back. 17 minutes of pure uncut Pink Floyd. Sometimes quite accommodating, then unapologetically challenging – a more worldly and politically minded Echoes with a bigger budget, more seasoned musicians and better technology. It owes something to that version of Floyd that took rocking seriously.

And they still sneak in some free-improv 8 minutes in. Even that sounds more expensive.

In more than one way, the cascading “listy” ending of Dogs is reminiscent of Dark Side of the Moon closer Eclipse.

Meek and obedient you follow the leader down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.

from Sheep
There’s a cohesive sound to the record, tight and muscular, distinctly 1977. Tracks like Pigs (Three Different Ones) follow a pattern of rocking solidly for most of their length, veering off into those dreamy grooves Floyd was famous for, getting weird a few minutes, then amping the outro into a frenzy.

I love Richard Wright’s keys on this record, especially the intro to Sheep. It’s like a bottle of 1977 on a windowsill with the sun shining through it. There’s plenty of shifts in style over the next ten minutes, as we follow a sheep to slaughter.

I remember distinctly driving my grandmother somewhere and her asking me to turn this song off. It gets a little surreal in the middle, which you have to be in the right frame of mind to dig. I love how Water’s vocal slides along the music and curdles into distortion during that last verse. Grandma just didn’t get it. Out of the car, Grandma!! 

Waters returns with Part 2 of Pigs on the Wing, reminding us that solace can be found despite everything you just heard.

 

44-pink-floyd-obscure-by-clouds1. Obscured by Clouds
1972, Produced by Pink Floyd
Recorded at Strawberry Studios, Château d’Hérouville, France


Obscured by Clouds is the last record before they’d hit it big with Dark Side of the Moon. It’s the sound of a confident, tight band moving steadily into 1972 – owning their ground, grooving on it, stomping on it mercilessly, and covering it with a little sugar and tetrahydrocannabinol.

It’s the sound of a confident, tight band moving steadily into 1972.

As the last of their records to be made without a unifying concept (until post this lineup) there are strong individual songs that don’t necessarily speak to a larger theme, and  that’s not a bad thing.

Kicking off with two instrumentals, it’s like Jaws not showing up for an hour into the movie the first time you hear David Gilmour and Richard Wright’s voices in the beautifully meandering Bridges Burning.

The slow-burn of Obscured by Clouds gives way to the thrashing When You’re In, a sound only hinted at previously in songs like The Nile Song on More.

These are radio-ready yet never got on the radio. Take The Golds It’s In The... and Childhood’s End. These could sit right alongside rock radio classics of the era yet never got the attention – even after they hit it big and their next record stayed on the charts for 741 weeks.

Wot’s… Uh The Deal? is another sweet slice of acoustic Gilmour replete with that easy-breezy Wright piano that reminds us he knows what music sounds like on earth, too. Mudmen certainly points to the band that will make Dark Side a year later, as do the sexy guitars in the otherwise uneven Stay. I mean, I love the music, and parts of the vocal, and how the chorus almost sounds like Steely Dan. But it has at least one or two cringey lines in it, lets be honest.

Childhood’s End, a song that suspiciously pops up on a lot of my mixes over the years, shows they still know how to burn one down. Another radio ready hit that never was.

What else? Man this article is long. Roger used some of that Corporal Clegg energy and made a toe-tapping ditty about dying in the war called Free Four. Waters would base most of The Wall and The Final Cut on this subject, but here he’s using broader strokes. 

“The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime.”

from Free Four

And in case you were wondering where those psychedelic guys that made Echoes went, album closer Absolutely Curtains puts the whole thing to bed neatly with a little more restraint, and two minutes tribal chanting to end the record.

Obscured by Clouds is the end of an era. They would never make another record of such loose and unrelated songs again. Dark Side of the Moon would change the stakes going forward. They would get more literal and less psychedelic every release going forward.

 

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Success would change the dynamics of the band and ultimately this lineup – who stopped playing together live in 1981 and who went on without Waters in 1985.  They wouldn’t play together in this lineup again for 20 years, reuniting for Live8 in 2005.  I never thought I’d see them together again.

Rick Wright would unfortunately die in 2008 making a true reunion impossible. Gilmour and Mason released one last Pink Floyd record last year in Wright’s honor, working with many of Wrights unused recordings. Famously, this was another Pink Floyd record without Waters.

Gilmour is busy for a man about to turn 70. Apart from releasing that Floyd record, he dropped a single last week in advance of an upcoming solo album and tour. Ever experimenting, the single is based on a jingle used in the French transit system. I like it. I think it’s the least uptight thing I’ve heard from Dave in years.

At 71, Waters is just coming off the hugely successful The Wall tour and upcoming film. He’s working on new material and re-releasing his under-appreciated 1992 solo record Amused to Death in September. He released the revamped What God Wants video from that record this week.

I’ll admit I was on Team Waters back in high school. I love all his solo records and he’s ultimately one of my top 5 favorite songwriters and recording artists.

Nick Mason is also 71, but he shaved the Spinal Tap mustache years ago.

 

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Rest Easy Eric Curran a.k.a M.C Krispy E

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Almost every year for the past 6 years and on the same day, I’ve posted the same pic of me in the hospital  during my temporary and untimely demise  in 2015. A few weeks after I was back to “normal”, I asked Eric “Why’d you take the pics?” And he said, “I knew you would want to write about it if you lived.” Eric was right. Eric was often right and Eric always had my best interest at heart. I am going to miss my friend.

You ever meet someone and become friends immediately?! Well this was not the case with Eric. Before he was my manager at Morgan Stanley, I would often see this 6’4″, giant white guy walk up to the only black woman at work, say something then walk away without any hint of human emotion. Naturally I thought he was a jerk until I asked her “Yo, is that dude bothering you?” She laughed and proceeded to tell me he was a great person, which I ultimately got to experience first hand. Little did I know this Italian from Staten Island was more Brooklyn than most Brooklynites.

Eric was not with the shits!! If there were ever someone who lived their life in direct, honest and no uncertain terms, that would be Eric. He would ask me questions at work like “Why are the other consultants making more money than you?” I knew the answer to that question and so did he. Eric then proceeded to increase my salary by 15K. After arguing with all our managers that “You need to hire Alfred!”, they eventually did 1 year prior to the 2015 incident. In the hospital, one of my friends asked me, “What if you didn’t have health insurance when this happened?” I would be in debt for the rest of my life is the obvious answer. I still am in debt for the rest of my life but at least, it is to those who made sure I had a more enjoyable life and for that, I will gladly repay.

My mom loved to tell me the story of how she met Eric. After they told her I was going to be in the ICU for some time, she told the doctor “Well I’m not going anywhere.” She then hears a voice from that back of the room that says “Well I’m not going anywhere either!” That was Eric and in true form, he was at that hospital every single day until I was discharged.

Eric passed away in December 2021 of stage 4 cancer. After feeling faint on his way to my bbq, he went to get checked out and was diagnosed. During the past 5 years, Eric lost his mom, twin brother and dad. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have felt like but I’m glad that pain he was feeling is no more.

It’s been a bit difficult to deal with it to be quite honest and I’ve been writing this in my head for years but never had the bravery or grace to accept that my friend wouldn’t be here soon. I also can’t imagine what it must be like to lose your entire family nucleus unexpectedly. In true Eric fashion however, I would like this to not be about me but whomever has lost someone and has been coping. I’ve always intimated that my life would not be as enriched as it was were it not for the people in it. The problem with that is there is also no way to deny that it feels empty without those who helped craft your path. Rather than focus on the negative, I would rather focus on the examples of duty, family and emotional intelligence. All concepts reinforced by Eric that have led me to have successful relationships since I’ve put them into practice.

From being my manager to my business partner, writer, book editor, artistic director, and most importantly, my friend, I am going to miss you MC Krispy E a.k.a “Enrique Pollazo!” And although you told me Enrique means Henry in Spanish and not Eric, it was too late!

Sidebar. The day I was discharged, while everyone was deciding what was best for me, no one had remembered that I would need clothes in order to leave the hospital. Eric shows up (unasked) with all the clothes I had on the day I coded, laundered and ready to go. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve friends like this but i need to keep doing it! Sidebar complete.

Rest in Peace Eric. “Be Good.”

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Writing Your First Book / Should I Self Publish?

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I had the distinct pleasure of  participating in a panel discussion on writing your first book, presented by the Harlem chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.  Alongside Jim St. Germain, Author – A Stone of Hope: A Memoir and Dr. Keneshia Nicole Grant, Author – The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century.  We opined on pain points, benefits and strategies regarding our inaugural voyages into authorship. Feel free to watch for your self and I hope this provides some insight to all those looking to make the same voyage. Enjoy!

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What the NFT is a BEEPLE?

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On March 11 this year, the digital artist Beeple sold a collage of digital images from his “Everydays” series for nearly 70 million dollars as an NFT, or non-fungible token. And if that sentence confuses you, you’re not alone.

A non-fungible token is a unit of data on a digital ledger called a blockchain, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, and thus they are not interchangeable. NFTs can represent digital files such as art, audio, video, and other forms of creative work. While the digital files themselves are infinitely reproducible, the NFTs representing them are tracked on their underlying blockchains and provide buyers with proof of ownership.” – Wikipedia

Still confused? Let the artist himself explain it, and learn how he went from NFT newbie to making the third most expensive artwork by a living artist in three months. Not to suggest Beeple is an overnight success. The “Everydays” series alone involved creating a piece of art every day since May 1, 2007 – and he hasn’t missed a day.

Check out some of Beeple’s amazing and controversial work below.

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