1. Shine On You Crazy Diamond

2. Welcome To The Machine

3. Have A Cigar

4. Wish You Were Here

5. Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Adrians Album Reviews
You'd have to go back as far as 'Meddle' to find a Pink Floyd album structured like this, a long extended piece ( albeit split into two sections ) and then a few shorter songs to add variety and fill out the whole. 'Dark Side Of The Moon' had been such a massive success, that Pink Floyd were in something of a quandary as to how to produce a follow-up. Record company pressures added to the confusion, a subject touched upon in the lyrical matter of 'Welcome To The Machine' and 'Have A Cigar' in particular. Truth is, Pink Floyd didn't have very much material ready. 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond', a tribute to lost founder member Syd Barrett, arrived out of stretches of studio jamming. The three songs inbetween the two 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' tracks were all Roger Waters songs, whereas in the past, you'd have got one Waters, one Gilmour and one Wright. Rick Wright has no song-writing credits here bar a co-write for the 'Shine On' suite. Gilmour gets co-write credits for the title song and 'Shine On'. It doesn't really matter, I guess, but one result of the massive success of 'DSOTM' was that Pink Floyd became a far less democratic venture. Having said that ( phew! ), Rick Wright plays good keyboards throughout and Dave Gilmour shines in places, particularly all through 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond'. The instrumental keyboard and guitar introduction lasts for nearly nine minutes. A couple of minutes of vocals, and then more instrumental music to close. The 'reprise' that finishes the album is similarly instrumental heavy, but when the instrumental music is as gorgeous as this, nobody is complaining, least of all me. This nine minute introduction to 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' is slow, mournful and truly beautiful. Very touching, more so than the vocal section in a funny way. The guitar parts from Gilmour seem scientifically precise, but are no less impressive or touching for that.

Of the three shorter songs, I really love both 'Welcome To The Machine' and 'Wish You Were Here'. 'Welcome To The Machine' is monotone, lacking in melody. But then, the idea was oppression and technological fear. 'Welcome To The Machine' I find to be very addictive listening, very cold and dark yet able to provoke an emotional response, certainly. The title song is beautiful, the lyrics if you read them as laid out on paper work as poetry. They sound great when sung, which is important as well, but this is a good set of lyrics, no question. There is a folky atmosphere, a weary vocal, a few touches of the blues about Gilmour's guitar work. The title song is better than the already decent 'Welcome To The Machine' and very nearly a match for the opening 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' ( parts 1-5, if you really wanted to know ). 'Have A Cigar' is the clear weakpoint of the album. A dog of a song, seemingly an attempt at providing a little groovy funk aka 'Money', but it falls flat on its face. The funky aspect is clumsily executed - neither the guitar nor keyboard parts sound comfortable. The vocals are provided by Roy Harper, and don't sound great either. Roger Waters was apparently meant to sing the song, but never got a satisfactory vocal down. The closing 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' ( parts 6-9, this time ) is less beautiful than the opening sequence, but still impressive and gorgeous all the same. It ties up the album very well.

Splitting 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' was a great idea, actually. It gives the illusion that 'Wish You Were Here' is a more cohesive work than it really is! This is no 'Dark Side Of The Moon' conceptually or in terms of easy flow one track to the next. The transition from 'Have A Cigar' through to the title song is a case in point. 'Have A Cigar' fades out to the sound of a transistor radio, 'Wish You Were Here' opens with the sound of a transitor radio amid voices and crackles - but the songs don't naturally lend themselves to be joined in such fashion. Anyways! 'Wish You Were Here' on the strength of the title track and 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' alone is more than impressive. Add in 'Welcome To The Machine' with its fear and paranoia, and you can forgive them 'Have A Cigar', really you can. A step down from 'Dark Side Of The Moon' this may be, but it's not that much of a step - this is still mighty stuff.

Rolling Stone
Without Pink Floyd we would not have the European sci-fi multitudes (Hawkwind, Can, Amon Duul II and all their little friends) to kick around. They were the first to explore the upper reaches of the chemical heavens, and their commercial and artistic superiority, if ever it was in doubt, was brutally confirmed by Dark Side of the Moon. That 1973 album has now sold over 6,000,000 units worldwide - 3,000,000 in the U.S. alone. Advance orders for their followup (two years in the making) topped 900,000, one of the largest advance figures in Columbia's history.

Talk has it that the waiting period was prolonged by the band's own paranoia. To release anything would commit them to a competition with their own past that they could not hope to win.

If so, their fears have been realized.

Excerpts from a KWST-FM Call-In Program:

Julie Foreman, 15, Burbank, California: "It's not good. It just drags on. If somebody had tried to copy 'Echoes' off "Meddle," it wouldn't sound the same. But I think anyone could redo this and make it sound better."

Le Roy Guilford, 23, Anaheim, California: "When I first bought it, I was really down on it. It's growing on me a little but I still don't think it's Pink Floyd as Pink Floyd should be. It shows them as being bored with what they do."

By their own admission, Pink Floyd will never bring home any blue ribbons for their instrumental abilities. Their mastery of their tools peaks at competence. The illusion of complexity that caused their drooling legions to make wild claims of high-art accomplishment was actually nothing more than the skillful manipulation of elements so simple - the basic three chords everyone else uses - that any collection of bar backs could grind out a note-for-note reproduction without difficulty.

One of the things that made DSOTM so striking was that it showed them at full recognition of their limitations as musicians. In the past Pink Floyd has often conceptually outdistanced their minimal technical skills, but everything on that record seemed perfectly calculated never to cross the line. The combination of elementary but flawless playing and correspondingly tasteful studio effects created a kind of spacey mood music that suddenly made sense to people who couldn't have been persuaded to buy one of their previous albums at gunpoint. But most of the music on this album seems determined to picture Pink Floyd as just another conventional rock & roll band, ignoring their strengths of self-analysis in order to gain entry to an arena in which they aren't equipped to do battle.

The cardinal offender is David Gilmour, by most counts the most technically efficient. No championship guitarist, he nonetheless had enough intelligent ideas to maintain the group's ultraimportant link to the bedrock demands of their mass audience. He oversteps his bounds in several places on Wish You Were Here, however, indulging in protracted solos that present him as just another competent guitarist who thinks with his fingers instead of his head.

Gilmour plays a nice acoustic duet (with himself tracked through a radio) as an intro to the title tune, which has vaguely pleasant echoes of Loudon Wainwright in its stark approach. It's the most successful song on the album until the full band makes its grandly faceless entrance, at which point the number immediately nosedives to ho-hum level. After all the time they've devoted to molding their shortcomings into something uniquely workable as a band, Pink Floyd should know better than to turn around and imitate the transparent, traditional rock-band methodology to which they supposedly present an alternative.

Tim Devins, 19, Northridge, California: "Musically. I think they're a little less daring than they have been. I don't think this is a par excellence work, as the last one can be considered. I want to listen to it more before I make a final decision."

Crucial to the process of learning to live with their limitations was the full integration of the studio as an instrument, an option they exercised far more effectively than most of the competition. But here, where they're bent on playing it straight so much of the way, the effects become accentuated to a point where it all sounds overlaid. This doesn't complement the music, it fights it, and the effects sound gimmicky. The overall sound loses the occasionally breathtaking dimensions that made DSOTM such a grabber for people who'd never considered Pink Floyd anything more than random space noise.

Bill Hein, 20, Palos Verdes Estates, California: "I'm a little disappointed actually. None of the album really stays in my head; it just doesn't seem to be that powerful. When they did the song 'Echoes,' I really could visualize being out in a field or forest, watching the sun come up over a pond in the mist. But this album hasn't had any effect on me so far."

"Shine on You Crazy Diamond" is initially credible because it purports to confront the subject of Syd Barrett, the long and probably forever lost guiding light of the original Floyd. But the potential of the idea goes unrealized; they give such a matter-of-fact reading of the goddamn thing that they might as well be singing about Roger Waters's brother-in-law getting a parking ticket. This lackadaisical demeanor forces, among other things, a reevaluation of their relationship to all the space cadet orchestras they unconsciously sired. The one thing those bands have going for them, in their cacophonously inept way, is a sincere passion for their "art." And passion is everything of which Pink Floyd is devoid.

Wish You Were Here is about the machinery of a music industry that made and helped break Syd Barrett. (They even farm out a vocal to Roy Harper, an obscure but respected British singer/songwriter for whom the machinery has never quite worked, to add that authentic measure of defeated cynicism.) Their treatment, though, is so solemn that you have to ask what the point is. If your use of the machinery isn't alive enough to transcend its solemn hum - even if that hum is your subject - then you're automatically trapped. In offering not so much as a hint of liberation, that's where this album leaves Pink Floyd.

Jill Bohr, 20, Riverside, California: "I like the theme that runs through the whole thing. You'd have to be in Alaska to know. It's Out of Space and Out of This Time. I've been in Alaska for the last year and all of a sudden I heard 'Welcome to the Machine.' They've bud up there, haven't they? They caught the feeling of all the machines that go all day and night in the summertime up there

Wayne Trenkler, 16, Arcada, California: "This new album good. I don't have it myself but I've heard it many a time because all my friends have it. (RS 199) 5/5

Amazon
Wish You Were Here is a song cycle dedicated to Pink Floyd's original frontman, Syd Barrett, who'd flamed out years before: two grimly funny songs about the evils of the music business ("By the way, which one's Pink?"), and two long, touching ones about the band's vanished friend. The real star of the show, though, is the production: sparkling, convoluted, designed to sound deeply oh-wow under the influence--and pretty great sober too, with David Gilmour getting lots of space for his most lyrical guitar playing ever. And, though the album is big and ambitious, even bombastic, it somehow dodges being pretentious--the Barrett tributes are honest and heartfelt, beneath all the grand gestures and stereophonic trickery.

Keno
Floyd's follow up to Dark Side Of The Moon and a masterpiece. My favorite Pink Floyd album. A concept album dedicated to their founding member and departed band leader, acid casualty Syd Barrett. Only five songs on this album but the flow between them is tops. The album opens very strong with "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (first five parts) it's lyrics saids it all about Syd, some real clean guitar solos here by Gilmoure. "Welcome to the Machine" is next and is a nice blend with the opening song. You almost wish that the next track "Have a Cigar" was a little more faster paced, but still a nice number. That is followed by the title cut and best song on the album, "Wish You Were Here". Love the acoutic guitar on this one plus a nice blend from the synthesizer and piano. The album slowly closes with "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" (last four parts), not as strong as the first few parts that open the album but still a nice finale.

Billboard
After more than two years without a record, the prototype space-rock band returns with their first Columbia effort. The electronics and overall spacey feel that has won them so many fans is still present, but the album is in many ways the group's most commercial effort. Several shorter cuts punctuate a nine part potpourri, with one of them, "Wish You Were Here," carrying the same infectious quality that "Money" did. Typically good guitar work from the group, as well as the usual easy going synthesizer and keyboard work and occasional hypnotic background vocals. The nine-segment cut can be easily broken up for airplay, but the shorter cuts seem to be designed for that function and work well in that capacity. Possibly the best effort from the band since Atom Heart Mother. Best cuts: "Welcome To The Machine," Part Two of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," "Have A Cigar," "Wish You Were Here."