Pink Floyd is a band seriously dedicated to playing soundtrack music for the more sinister and bizarre aspects of the human misadventure. If you doubt this, just listen to their musical score for the film More--my old college roommate did and every time he listened to it his life came up snake eyes. Pink Floyd possess that kind of power when they�re locked into the maze of the subconscious.
The Floyd�s music is cerebral and hallucinatory; sort of like Marvin Hamlisch on an amphetamine/quaalude lollipop �n� icicle binge. Often, when they�re really strokin� the silver-blue spinal chord of the mega-galactic beat, their music leaps �n� sneers through the sloppy, overgrown gardens of the criminally surreal, coming gently to rest somewhere between the brio of a sonic tampon and the vaginitus of Kubrick�s star baby. Their understanding of the ultimate giggle was nicely portrayed in their long ago soundtrack adventure for a PBS special on Salvador Dali, the grand wazoo of odd. The special was called Hello, Dali and featured a montage of Dali landscapes underscored with music from Meddle (specifically the song �Echoes�). Under these kinds of circumstances, the Floyd wallow in the gleeful pleasure domes of the supreme. And these are the circumstances they should be allowed to constantly inhabit, these are the moments when they slip �n� slide through the miracle lick of unadulterated creation. And that�s the way uh huh...you know the rest.
Lately, however, they�ve let their music get lost in the easiness of over-complexity, spiraling through that white hole created when Roger Waters screamed on �Careful With That Axe, Eugene.� They�ve forsaken that insane spark of theirs for the undying acceptance of rich teen-nods, the teen-nod being the hazy habitu� of the coliseums of rock�n�roll whose only purpose is to stroke the grim blue underbelly of the swisy huh and take sidelong glances into the suburbanized maelstroms of chocareasms. The teen-nod when he�s on full power can glom the melt-down beauty of unconsciousness like no other being on this sluggish green sphere.
With their new opus, though, they�ve managed to reattain an important edge on their noisy journey into a fractured Oz. The Wall is Krell music supreme, a tangled expression of the sheer nastiness of the 70s, a four-sided operetta of the morbid swirling around in a vortex of contradiction and confusion. As a conceptual piece, it�s solid. As a musical entity, its power lies in its awesome ability to underscore the cool imprecisions of chaos confirmed. As an expression of neurotic beauty, it can hypnotize with its gruesome insistence. And as structured noise, it can turn your nerve endings into concrete roadways of carcinomatous joy and short-sheet your sensibilities. In short, this work is a perfect anti-rhythmic parable of neurosis personified. No matter what its faults (and there are a few), The Wall is an erosive stroll into the athetoid plains of Roger Waters� inner psychic mechanizations and the rest of the band�s overwhelming amoebaen response to said ideations. Wuzza. Wuzza.
To try and single out individual songs in a four-sided piece of conceptual music is hard. The repeated themes of breaking down the barriers that lead to deceit, unhappiness and meanness are omnipresent throughout. As a matter of fact, during the length of the entire fourth side--a Wagnerian acid overload wipeout sorta like Kafka on an adrenal high--the imagery of the wall becomes so oppressive that it reminds this listener of the ending of Children of the Damned when George Sanders faces the kids with the shiny eyes and loses.
Perhaps if you stretch the point a little, two individual songs do survive the test for separate entity status. One is �Young Lust,� with as searing a guitar montage as heard from this band for quite some time; the other is �Comfortably Numb,� which is about the best way to describe the production work of Bob Ezrin on this LP. Pink Floyd deserve a producer who has a better understanding of noise than Ezrin, who is mostly a master of clutter. Pink Floyd are a band of stark contrasts, and they need a producer who can translate this discomfort to the listener.
Dr. Joyce Brothers would have a field day with this album. I give it an 88 because it makes me wanna put cats in Samsonite briefcases and strangle �em with ties...Anyway, Pink Floyd�s The Wall is great background music for taking your moped and ramming it into the side of a building.
�
Get your own Free Home Page