Pink Floyd - Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd

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Free Music Notes for Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd

Free Music Review: DON'T MIND THE MISSING BITS - THEY MAY BE THE MAIN POINT
Hit: 5 Stars

The essence of the post-modern or "po-mo" movement in the arts is that it doesn't know quite what it is, but it knows what it likes. It's the sort of art that gets created when art-critics get fed up with being critics and start trying to be artists in their own right. They decide on the sort of statement they want to make, then they pick over their own favourite influences extracting a bit here and a bit there to fit the statement. In fact all rock'n'rollers young enough to have grooved on Elvis (Presley, not Costello) are into this to some extent. The point is that placing familiar elements in a new context should bring out new truths in service of the artists own agenda. Some would say that the further he distances himself from the spirit of the original works, the more likely he is to say something fresh.

At its worst, this can just be music-by-numbers, a jigsaw or patchwork of influences without any real message. This happened a lot in the 1990's with Brit-pop, Grunge and so on. Anybody who was around in the 60's or 70's went through half the nineties muttering things like "The whole bl**dy album sounds like `I Am The Walrus'". Nevertheless it can make great art: think of how Bruce took elements of Elvis, Dylan, Jagger and garage punk, and created a complete musical vision for the last quarter of the 20th century. Less obviously but just as significantly, some of the most inspiring acts of recent decades (e.g. Clapton, Santana, R.E.M.) have owed their flair to the humility and reverence with which they have meshed together different musical idioms.

The weird thing about "Echoes" is that the Floyd never openly declared or traded on their influences. They were simply themselves. To the extent that they had major influences, these were mostly outside rock - in the fields of avant-garde (Cage, Stockhausen), late romantic tone poets (e.g. Bartok), music hall and nursery rhyme. And ultimately the Floyd's best work, right through from "Piper" to "Bell", was pure accessible pop. What made it deep was all the disturbing sonic and lyrical undercurrents. Above all they were sincere. They wrote their lyrics from the heart and aired their joys and sorrows as a band in public. In other words, no band could have been further removed from the cold, calculating, distanced, ironic world of post-modernism.

AND YET here are the Floyd now, seeming brazenly to reinvent themselves, to distance themselves from their own creative muse. The approach for "Echoes" seems to have been almost calculatedly to place their most famous songs in a (some have said jarringly) different context. And by taking bits out of seamless concept albums and reintegrating them more or less seamlessly into new surroundings, they are (intentionally or not) making a new, distanced statement. "This is what we were....look how we did this.....see the effect we were aiming for here....see how we changed...." People think they are buying a greatest hits collection - I'm not sure that's what this is about. Half the statement of the original albums was in an album-length flow of ideas. Change that, and you change the meaning.

So supposing this theory is right. Then how, in a project like this, would you go about providing the shock of the unexpected that was always an essential part of listening to the Floyd? With the many excited new listeners this package has attracted, it's easy. But how do you continue to jar the perceptions of people who have been listening to some of these tracks every day for 30 years? How do you provide the "cognitive dissonance", the shock to the listener's world-view, the disturbing element that made their original work so...disturbing. Simple!

(1) You leave out a couple of landmark songs that your greatest fans would expect to find in there (e.g. Careful With That Axe Eugene).
(2) You chuck in a couple of historical curiosities (e.g. When The Tigers Broke Free).
(3) You play the odd mixing trick with tracks whose every tick is ingrained in many people's subconscious (e.g. the echoing repeats at the end of Us And Them).
(4) Finally, and most importantly, you calculatedly and ironically and post-modernly take a couple of tracks that are your real icons, that people would regard any interference with as tantamount to sacrilege (principally Echoes itself), and . . . . . you chop bits out.

Would this theory imply that the concept album is dead? Hardly! People are assuming that the chopping out was little more than an accident, to make room for a couple more tracks. I think the chopped-out bits may be the central conceptual flourish of a new concept album - perhaps the most radical concept album of the band's career. So what is the concept? What could be more post-modern, more brazenly self-referential (possibly to the point of narcissism) than a concept album based on the life of (possibly) the greatest band in the world, made by themselves, entirely through the arrangement of their own archives, without a scrap of editorial connecting tissue?

This is all speculation, make up your own mind. One alternative is that a recording company executive thought it would simply boost his bonus to get out the scissors and push another greatest hits collection onto the market. But you don't really believe that, do you?

To my own surprise, I think the new album works. It contains most of the Floyd's best tracks and a few others, superbly remastered and at an appealing price. Over time, the new sequencing may even start to take root and yield connections that were not there in the original setting.

Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd Poster

Interestingly, the album's nonchronological track listing works--the summery, childhood enchantment of "See Emily Play" is right next to the school discipline of "Happiest Days of Our Lives"--and at least this way no one will switch off when material from A Momentary Lapse of Reason comes around. Despite the curious omission of "Atom Heart Mother," this really is the very best of the Floyd--from the throbbing "One of These Days" to the pop operatic "Great Gig in the Sky" to the genius silvery fluidity of Dave Gilmour's guitar work. This is timeless, as many members of Sigur Rós, Radiohead, and the Beta Band will attest. --Kevin Maidment

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