“Take It Back” ( The Division Bell, 1994)
Occasionally the on-record majesty approaches the drama storming in Waters’ brain, though, as on “The Gunner’s Dream,” a Spectoral ballad with Springsteen-like stakes (and sax!) and a relatively poignant lyric about a gunner’s peaceful fantasies (“You can relax on both sides of the tracks”) in the seconds before his shot-down plane crashes to his death.Ĥ6. Speaking of brutally self-serious - 1983’s The Final Cut required a major emotional investment in spending time in Roger Waters’ headspace to make it through all 46 somber, self-indulgent minutes.
“The Gunner’s Dream” ( The Final Cut, 1983) It would soon never define them again, but you wish the band coulda carried at least a crumb of this smart-alecky inside-jokiness into their brutally self-serious dominant period.Ĥ7. Originally recorded in 1965 and not officially released for another half century, “Double O Bo” saw the band tributing early hero Bo Diddley in typically perverse fashion: With a mutant Diddley groove and a narrative about Bo as a super-cool super agent who drinks himself to death. Not much song here to speak of, exactly, but the number of doors-of-perception this must’ve opened for music fans in the early ’70s is hard to fathom.Ĭareful with that axe, Roger! The Pink Floyd frontman’s screaming-in-a-hotel-room voice would well wear out its welcome by the time he left the band a half-decade later - if not by the end of The Wall‘s 81 minutes - but the first time it tears through one of the album’s more sedate-seeming tracks (“Would you like to learn to fly?/ WOULD YA LIKE TO SEE ME TRY?”), it’s legitimately unnerving.Ĥ8. “On the Run” ( The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973)Ī fascinatingly ahead of its time interstitial: “On the Run” basically feels like interstellar chase music, or a decade-early soundtrack for the action scenes in TRON, or “Flight of the Bumblebee” as imagined by Giorgio Moroder. With their debut album turning 50 this week, we’ve decided to count down our choices for the 50 best Pink Floyd songs - from the proggiest to the poppiest to the most psychedelic, and the mini-masterpieces that were all three and more. 1 rock fans didn’t even bother to cry “sell out!” over.
And yes, The Wall was a monstrous double-LP statement of egomania from which there was no returning, but the set’s rock operatics couldn’t obscure the most seamless integration of disco’s thump that any major rock band had yet achieved - resulting in a Hot 100 No. 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.