![]() The Wish You Were Here album was the band's first for their new deal with Columbia/CBS for most of the world save Europe where they remained with Harvest/EMI. Yes, the '77 punk movement largely followed in response to the overblown pomposity of their ilk, but play Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and Animals back to back and see which one sounds more like a bilious screed from a bunch of pissed-off Britons who don't give a f-k what their fans want to hear. Yes, Wish You Were Here is overwhelmed by a combined 26 minutes and nine movements of jazzy art-funking (and no shortage of fretting about The Machine), but it's also centered around the profound humanity of one of the great tear-jerking ballads in rock history. Yes, they set the standard for college-dorm stoner rock with the prismatic prog of The Dark Side of the Moon, but in between the LP's space-rock zone-outs are a pulse-racing proto-EDM instrumental, a heart-stopping soul vocal exorcism and a couple ripping sax solos. Starting with the Syd Barrett-stewarded kaleidoscopic psychedelia Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967 - a half-century old this Saturday (Aug. 5) - the band showed a truly staggering artistic flexibility and open-eared inventiveness, for which they remain oddly underrated in an era that increasingly views them as stodgy, cerebral rock puritans. ![]() But they also broadened the music's width, with one of the most far-reaching musical palettes of any band approaching their magnitude. ![]() ![]() Obviously, they stretched out the length - double albums, side-long jams, songs that had more movements and ideas than entire LPs by other bands. If Led Zeppelin were the band most responsible for hard rock's vertical expansion in the '70s, hitting previously unforeseeable heights for the genre, were the band that expanded it the most horizontally. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |