Red Mosquito

After a week straight of Lightning Bolt, I'm pretty sure this album is the best thing they've done since Binaural and/or maybe Riot Act. (For me, RA has the better individual tracks, but doesn't hold up as well over the full length of the album. And FYI, I'm also a huge defender of S/T as it holds a special place in my heart.) Could it have been better? Sure, as we could argue any PJ album could have been better with a few tweeks here and there... but LB just seems to be one of the most consistent albums of their career. You can read that as "consistently mediocre" if that's your take... but for a band that has driven us crazy with their tracklist choices, I'm giving LB credit for creating a solid album from beginning to end.

bluestate wrote:After a week straight of Lightning Bolt, I'm pretty sure this album is the best thing they've done since Binaural and/or maybe Riot Act.

I agree. But, i disagree that this statement is meaningful. The Post-Riot Act bar isn't exactly very high.

hlniv wrote:

bluestate wrote:After a week straight of Lightning Bolt, I'm pretty sure this album is the best thing they've done since Binaural and/or maybe Riot Act.

I agree. But, i disagree that this statement is meaningful. The Post-Riot Act bar isn't exactly very high.

I have such a hard time with this. My best friend is a Pearl Jam fan and our paths diverged around the time of Binaural and Riot Act. He agrees that they've lost that special something. I totally can't see it that way. I guess it's just a matter of the band developing in their way, and each of us developing in our ways, and in some cases there's more compatability than others.

Anyway, I just got a bunch of PJ vinyl, and I have to say that Binaural and Riot Act are probably the two I'm most excited to listen to.

Lightning Bolt is a good record, but I feel like Clones of Ed, Stone, Matt got together with Mike and Jeff and made a album and BoB tried to make it sound like Pearl Jam. This album is missing something organic. Ten is great dispite this problem. Riot Act isn't great, but is as organic as a rotting pumkin farm. To bad too because had some of these song been recorded in the No Code era they would have been so good.

Tj wrote:Lightning Bolt is a good record, but I feel like Clones of Ed, Stone, Matt got together with Mike and Jeff and made a album and BoB tried to make it sound like Pearl Jam. This album is missing something organic. Ten is great dispite this problem. Riot Act isn't great, but is as organic as a rotting pumkin farm. To bad too because had some of these song been recorded in the No Code era they would have been so good.

Welp

I like Lightning Bolt's first half. Sometimes I think MFS is their best post 2000 rocker. So raw and darkly energetic and bouncy like old angry pj. I wish Sleeping by Myself was not on there, since I already have that song on EV's E.S.
I wonder if they met more than twice and then recording only on those 2 spurs if I could help make a clear concise album. All this teamwork with songs coming from every which way is making it hard to make a record cohesive bc of all different thought processes when each's song is being written. Ex Mike said he wanted a pink Floyd song in Sirens. For some reason it doesn't sound that way in the end.

resonance of distance wrote:Mike said he wanted a pink Floyd song in Sirens. For some reason it doesn't sound that way in the end.

Pearl Jam, like many people, do wild associations when it comes to Pink Floyd. having a shit ton of reverb and echo in a guitar sound doesn't equate Pink Floyd at all. neither being bombastic. sure, Pink Floyd have been culprit of dumbing down their own definition of what they should sound like (most notably on the Gilmour-led albums) but the Pink Floyd sound, to me, is something that was created over a long period of time and that is virtually absent of their most commonly known hits (Money, Wish You Were Here, Another Brick in the Wall, Learning to Fly and even Comfortably Numb to some extent). the guys in the band themselves describe their milestones more or less like this:

Interstellar Overdrive (for PJ fans who never listened to the original song, the Syd Barrett riff that PJ covers bookends an improvisational controlled chaos that went on often for over 20 minutes and which was a fan favorite in 66-67. again, this track was very different from the singles they were releasing at the time.)
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A Saucerful of Secrets (now the musical exploration is more mapped-out. former architecture student Roger Waters and Nick Mason built the song from a drawing they'd made, structuring this four-parts abstract musical painting from the peaks and valleys of their œuvre. they then began using the studio as an instrument.)
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Atom Heart Mother (this 24 minutes instrumental suite integrated brass, violins, a choir - doing some real weird stuff at times - and some creepy sound effects that took the listener on another abstract journey. the step forward here lies in some songwriting touches that the band, although disappointed with the results, kept as tools for many of their subsequent works.)
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Echoes (another side-long track in which PF blends the best bits of their 5 years of experimentations. written in the studio and made up of different snippets called "Nothing#1", "Nothing #2" and so on, this fantastic song also marked a high watermark for lyricist Roger Waters who decided that the line "Strangers passing in the street, by chance two separate glances meet and I am you and what I see is me" laid the blueprint for his humanist obsessions of the so-called golden years. long, evocative and heartfelt instrumental passages juxtaposed to one truly hair-raising abstract middle section more or less encapsulated what this band was about and turned out to be. it's their single most important turning point or song, at least for me.)
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Dark Side of the Moon (no need to introduce this one but i'll say that taken as a whole, it expands on the Echoes way of composing and this is where the lyrics became crucial to the band's releases - from then on, everything Waters would write would be concept albums or rock or classical operas. it also included On the Run which is a fucking weird piece of music for such a popular album.)

from then on (1973), Pink Floyd never really questionned the sound and approach they had found. the music, while still often brilliantly inspired, never really tried to shake the stereotypes that went with its trademark. they became better songwriters, better musicians (peaking on Animals if you ask me) to the detriment of the genuine explorations that led them there. it's a classic case of "the journey is the destination". what people like McCready consider "floydian" is based on late-era stereotypes that have little to do with what Pink Floyd used to be about. Mother is a high-class rock song but it could have been recorded by some other band and still sound quite the same. Comfortably Numb too, which is just perfect but far from being original. only its magnificient guitar solos set it apart from their contemporaries and defining Pink Floyd only by Gilmour's guitar is an insult to this band. in fact, it's such a common misconception that Gilmour himself fell for it on The Division Bell. when you go with that train of thought, you end up with On the Turning Away, Silent Lucidity and Sirens; songs that may or may not be abominations but clearly devoided of an ounce of creativity.

Comfortably Numb too, which is just perfect but far from being original. only its magnificient guitar solos set it apart from their contemporaries and defining Pink Floyd only by Gilmour's guitar is an insult to this band. in fact, it's such a common misconception that Gilmour himself fell for it on The Division Bell. when you go with that train of thought, you end up with On the Turning Away, Silent Lucidity and Sirens; songs that may or may not be abominations but clearly devoided of an ounce of creativity.

You made me read all that interesting analysis merely to arrive at this arrogant, hyperbolic and immature conclusion?

/coughing the word asshole

aurynsdad wrote:

Comfortably Numb too, which is just perfect but far from being original. only its magnificient guitar solos set it apart from their contemporaries and defining Pink Floyd only by Gilmour's guitar is an insult to this band. in fact, it's such a common misconception that Gilmour himself fell for it on The Division Bell. when you go with that train of thought, you end up with On the Turning Away, Silent Lucidity and Sirens; songs that may or may not be abominations but clearly devoided of an ounce of creativity.

You made me read all that interesting analysis merely to arrive at this arrogant, hyperbolic and immature conclusion?

/coughing the word asshole

Which part don't you agree with?

Probably the part that implies that the further you veer away from deliberate, inaccessible weirdness, the further you inevitably get from "true creativity" or some such notion. The general concept of creativity encompasses a lot more than simply whether or not something sounds weird or experimental--which I imagine isn't exactly what mastaflatch was meaning to convey, but it does sort of come across that way. And that viewpoint is kind of immature--at least in the sense that it seems to reflect a very superficial, ill-considered understanding of the concept of creativity.

The oft-ignored Lightning Bolt B-side "One Percenter" serves as the corollary to the main album. It acts as a one-song synopsis of the Lightning Bolt thesis and reflects lead singer's value system in its current distilled form.

The lyrics:

I embrace commercialism.
I embrace celebrity culture.
I used to revile it.
See you in Malibu, or Waikiki.

I embrace commercialism.
I embrace celebrity culture.
I used to revile it.
See you in Malibu, or Waikiki.

aurynsdad wrote:
You made me read all that interesting analysis merely to arrive at this arrogant, hyperbolic and immature conclusion?

/coughing the word asshole

Yes.

Did you get it out? Was it productive? Did you feel better following the conclusion of the act? Sometimes you can get a cock stuck in your throat.

Kevin Davis wrote:Probably the part that implies that the further you veer away from deliberate, inaccessible weirdness, the further you inevitably get from "true creativity" or some such notion. The general concept of creativity encompasses a lot more than simply whether or not something sounds weird or experimental--which I imagine isn't exactly what mastaflatch was meaning to convey, but it does sort of come across that way. And that viewpoint is kind of immature--at least in the sense that it seems to reflect a very superficial, ill-considered understanding of the concept of creativity.

well, you got me wrong. it's probably my fault. no need to be condescending though. i know what creativity is about. if my examples aren't eloquent enough, i'll try to make it clearer...

in fact, i'll let Roger Waters (quoted here as he spoke about A Momentary Lapse of Reason) do the job:

"I think it's a very facile but quite clever forgery. If you don't listen too closely, it does sound like Pink Floyd. It's got Dave Gilmour playing guitar. And with the considered intention of setting out to make something that sounds like everyone's conception of a Pink Floyd record, it's inevitable that you will reach that limited goal. [...] I'm sure it will do very well."

where creativity is involved, in Sirens, is, of course, in the songwriting. but then, the song itself, when played as a "McCready acoustic demo", sounds nothing like Pink Floyd...oh, wait! it's a mid-tempo song! just kidding.
what is McCready's implied definition of the Pink Floyd sound must then rely on the electric guitars tone (lots of reverb and echo) and maybe the production? no, not really because it fucking sounds like Bon Jovi. hence the lack of creativity and/or plain out lunacy of our man McCready at this point. i think it just shows how the guy barely knows what he is talking about when it comes to Pink Floyd and it contributes to propagate a lazy stereotype.

Sorry man, I didn't mean to be condescending. I suspect most people will agree with you that "Sirens" sounds nothing like Pink Floyd. But I also think Mike's comment is pretty in line with how unrelated to reality most artists' perceptions of their own music typically are, and across the board I think that type of thing usually reflects the type of convoluted understanding many artists typically have of their own work, at least more than it reflects their lack of understanding of the artist they're comparing themselves to. The fact that "Sirens" links to Pink Floyd in Mike's mind could result from something as simple as him having listened to "Wish You Were Here" one night before picking up the guitar with the intention of composing something in that frame of mind, and even though the song itself ended up sounding more or less different, the fact that Pink Floyd was the driving force behind that creative moment will cause him to feel forever as though it's in there somewhere, such that it almost becomes the overarching identity of the work. Not saying that's what happened specifically, just that generally there could be any number of red herrings like that along the creative path that might cause an artist to make a statement about the work that makes perfect sense to him but sounds like lunacy to a listener. In the end I think artists give those "our new album sounds like x artist!"-type statements a lot less thought than their fans typically do after the fact.

That said, I think there are creatively unique elements in most of Pink Floyd's records (certainly less so in the post-Waters records, I'll grant you), but I don't agree that those identifying features dissipate on their mega-huge '70's records simply for the fact that they make some concessions to more conventional songwriting forms and production styles. It's true that most rock bands could make a reasonable replica of "Mother" (Pearl Jam does, even though Eddie can't sing it very well), but I think that's a dubious yardstick by which to measure creativity in music--given the right tools there are very few pieces of music that couldn't be reasonably reproduced by a group of like-minded individuals, and sometimes I think people forget that there's not always necessarily more creativity tied into experimental weirdness than there is into plain old songwriting, that indeed oftentimes the former is so embarrassingly bereft of it that it gives the whole concept a bad name. Not saying that's the case with Floyd at all, but I would also surmise that Mike is not alone in remembering Floyd for what they became rather than, as you say, "what they used to be," and I admittedly don't understand why this particular artist's first few years where they were flitting from idea to idea like a teen girl changing hairstyles are necessarily a more credible point for freeze-framing their lasting identity than their years of mega-success where they streamlined those more outlandish ideas into a stricter artistic vision.

Just my thoughts. I enjoyed your write-up a lot.

Kevin Davis wrote:Sorry man, I didn't mean to be condescending. I suspect most people will agree with you that "Sirens" sounds nothing like Pink Floyd. But I also think Mike's comment is pretty in line with how unrelated to reality most artists' perceptions of their own music typically are, and across the board I think that type of thing usually reflects the type of convoluted understanding many artists typically have of their own work, at least more than it reflects their lack of understanding of the artist they're comparing themselves to. The fact that "Sirens" links to Pink Floyd in Mike's mind could result from something as simple as him having listened to "Wish You Were Here" one night before picking up the guitar with the intention of composing something in that frame of mind, and even though the song itself ended up sounding more or less different, the fact that Pink Floyd was the driving force behind that creative moment will cause him to feel forever as though it's in there somewhere, such that it almost becomes the overarching identity of the work. Not saying that's what happened specifically, just that generally there could be any number of red herrings like that along the creative path that might cause an artist to make a statement about the work that makes perfect sense to him but sounds like lunacy to a listener. In the end I think artists give those "our new album sounds like x artist!"-type statements a lot less thought than their fans typically do after the fact.

That said, I think there are creatively unique elements in most of Pink Floyd's records (certainly less so in the post-Waters records, I'll grant you), but I don't agree that those identifying features dissipate on their mega-huge '70's records simply for the fact that they make some concessions to more conventional songwriting forms and production styles. It's true that most rock bands could make a reasonable replica of "Mother" (Pearl Jam does, even though Eddie can't sing it very well), but I think that's a dubious yardstick by which to measure creativity in music--given the right tools there are very few pieces of music that couldn't be reasonably reproduced by a group of like-minded individuals, and sometimes I think people forget that there's not always necessarily more creativity tied into experimental weirdness than there is into plain old songwriting, that indeed oftentimes the former is so embarrassingly bereft of it that it gives the whole concept a bad name. Not saying that's the case with Floyd at all, but I would also surmise that Mike is not alone in remembering Floyd for what they became rather than, as you say, "what they used to be," and I admittedly don't understand why this particular artist's first few years where they were flitting from idea to idea like a teen girl changing hairstyles are necessarily a more credible point for freeze-framing their lasting identity than their years of mega-success where they streamlined those more outlandish ideas into a stricter artistic vision.

Just my thoughts. I enjoyed your write-up a lot.

Nice post

stip wrote:

Kevin Davis wrote:Sorry man, I didn't mean to be condescending. I suspect most people will agree with you that "Sirens" sounds nothing like Pink Floyd. But I also think Mike's comment is pretty in line with how unrelated to reality most artists' perceptions of their own music typically are, and across the board I think that type of thing usually reflects the type of convoluted understanding many artists typically have of their own work, at least more than it reflects their lack of understanding of the artist they're comparing themselves to. The fact that "Sirens" links to Pink Floyd in Mike's mind could result from something as simple as him having listened to "Wish You Were Here" one night before picking up the guitar with the intention of composing something in that frame of mind, and even though the song itself ended up sounding more or less different, the fact that Pink Floyd was the driving force behind that creative moment will cause him to feel forever as though it's in there somewhere, such that it almost becomes the overarching identity of the work. Not saying that's what happened specifically, just that generally there could be any number of red herrings like that along the creative path that might cause an artist to make a statement about the work that makes perfect sense to him but sounds like lunacy to a listener. In the end I think artists give those "our new album sounds like x artist!"-type statements a lot less thought than their fans typically do after the fact.

That said, I think there are creatively unique elements in most of Pink Floyd's records (certainly less so in the post-Waters records, I'll grant you), but I don't agree that those identifying features dissipate on their mega-huge '70's records simply for the fact that they make some concessions to more conventional songwriting forms and production styles. It's true that most rock bands could make a reasonable replica of "Mother" (Pearl Jam does, even though Eddie can't sing it very well), but I think that's a dubious yardstick by which to measure creativity in music--given the right tools there are very few pieces of music that couldn't be reasonably reproduced by a group of like-minded individuals, and sometimes I think people forget that there's not always necessarily more creativity tied into experimental weirdness than there is into plain old songwriting, that indeed oftentimes the former is so embarrassingly bereft of it that it gives the whole concept a bad name. Not saying that's the case with Floyd at all, but I would also surmise that Mike is not alone in remembering Floyd for what they became rather than, as you say, "what they used to be," and I admittedly don't understand why this particular artist's first few years where they were flitting from idea to idea like a teen girl changing hairstyles are necessarily a more credible point for freeze-framing their lasting identity than their years of mega-success where they streamlined those more outlandish ideas into a stricter artistic vision.

Just my thoughts. I enjoyed your write-up a lot.

Nice post

agreed!
for the record, Animals would probably top my favorite Floyd albums list. i'm not saying that their pre-DSOTM work is better or more important in the grand scheme of rock music but when they found their sound, they sat on it and like i said, fine-tuned their medium, Waters became a brilliant lyricist, Gilmour became a guitar legend, etc. why were their output from 73 to 79 so successful and still sounds so good today? because everything slowly fell into place before success hit; they now knew how to make their unit work perfectly and effortlessly. they had many trademarks and many crucial elements to their sound. that's probably why they could get away with weird stuff like On the Run, Welcome to the Machine, Don't Leave Me Now - people were also expecting the weirdness anyway.

all i'm saying, in the end, is that had PF exclusively been about a big guitar sound, it would have been an empty shell. The Beatles weren't just defined by their vocal harmonies, Pearl Jam is more than Eddie Vedder. i also completely acknowledge that inspiration can spark from anywhere but there's something called "humility". saying publicly that you've been inspired by the great 80s power-ballad tradition of hair-metal bands sounds less sexy than saying you wrote something after attending a Roger Waters show. i mean, a deaf leopard can't change its spots

I'm sorry I resorted to name-calling. Anyway, I agree with the Roger Waters comment, but I also do hear some Pink Floyd in Sirens, and I think of it as a very creative work. People can argue about what Mike was referring to, but I'm certainly not the only one to hear it. For me, it's the combination of:

- deep soul searching lyrical poetry (a la Waters, not Gilmour)
- Stone's background guitar effects
- Mike's combo of acoustic strumming and the solo
- and for me the biggest reason, often neglected: Matt Cameron's bombastic Nick Mason influenced drumming

A lot of people complain that Pearl Jam isn't willing to risk anything anymore with their work. I think Sirens is a great rebuttal to that. It risks everything by layering the most sincere lyrics over such an 80s ballad (and yes, "real" Pink Floyd were a master of that kind of music as well).

mastaflatch wrote:for the record, Animals would probably top my favorite Floyd albums list.

Well there, you and I agree. It, DSOTM, and Obscured by Clouds often take turns in that slot for me, but Animals has been there the most. Also, Echoes is probably the greatest song they've done, in my opinion.

I can't imagine anybody would argue against the idea that Pink Floyd's early years were examples of the 1960's blues/art/pop/psychedelia blending efforts...sonic pursuits, without much history to lean on, which were sometimes innovative and sometimes incredibly naive...while their 70's records became more of an exercise in utilizing a previously-established musical niche to push Waters' ever-focusing songwriting vision forward. The first half of their career is a journey in a way the latter simply can't be. That's not a dismissive thing to say...the 70's records have other qualities that supplant the function of that journey.

But the post-Waters records (and I very much enjoy Division Bell for what it is) frankly do not.

And, yeah, of all Pink Floyd records the one that seems easiest to draw a line to Sirens from is Momentary Lapse.

So there's that.