Pink Floyd - The Wall: Classic or Dud?

that was the surrogate band

this digression prob deserves it’s own thread?
also i dunno that any of the suggestins so far are “like” Comfortably Numb but ilm thought exercises usually fly right over my head
so i guess my own subtext here = kindly get off my lawn lol

the drug that I can hear very very clearly in the Wall is coke

― veronica moser

i think "animals" has a certain variety of cocaine paranoia as well; i wonder how much of the specific sound of "the wall" is just bob ezrin being bob ezrin

the thing that surprised me most when i revisited the wall a couple years back was how much _melody_ there is in it, given that pink floyd wasn't ever really a band to emphasize melody, and given that waters circa 1979 was not exactly a man possessed of superlative melodic gifts

pink floyd circa 1977 = here's a five minute interlude of barking dogs
pink floyd circa 1979 = here's, i don't know, a fucking barbershop quartet or something. maybe we'll get bruce johnston to sing backup on it. that would probably sound good, right?

The long pieces aren't melody-driven, but when they were writing self-contained songs from Meddle through The Wall, they were very tuneful. Not a lot of choruses, now that I think about it, but lots of beautiful singable verses.

What I don't like about Water's later years is that, starting with The Final Cut (although I think it works on that album), his melodies got more and more fragmented--Pros & Cons especially is almost a collage of tune bits and abandoned ideas, without the flow he used to have.

X-post

Well yeah, Animals is all about texture over melody.

ok i revisited this for the first time in 100 years and forgot how much i love "nobody home"

side three is definitely my favorite, i get "vera" in my head all the time

lol the "tear down the wall" part of "the trial" followed up with "outside the wall" still really gets to me

"when the tigers broke free" is ok but I wouldn't call it the top of this era

i would! one of waters' best songs. i love the final cut, whatever

Released 42 years ago today, evidently.

I recently listened to this for the first time since I dunno 1990? And it is - pretty great? Like I wouldn’t chuck it on while doing the dishes or hosting a fondue party - but as a dedicated sit-down 4 sides of vinyl experience it was pretty rich. Sure Waters exudes unfun/regrettable vibes but if you embrace the ugliness of it then it’s pretty impressive. And the good song:shouty/oompah nonsense quotient is much better than I remembered.

Which, I dunno, I guess this thread probably is overall pro-Wall? But despite loving Floyd as a teen I was pretty strongly influenced by the UK music press heaping shit on this one and was surprised by how much I respected it!

I am very pro-Wall, the storytelling & throughline still (mostly) hold up for me even if it is overangsty/dour etc.

me too. the wall RULES

listened to it far too much as a lol teen but once every five years or so it still rules

saw the film before I heard the album and I'm still disappointed about that big trial scene being another version & sounding so meh on the album

xp yeah i can't see myself going again for some time - it's a heavy listen

this time i found it productive to approach it as a period piece - like, that kind of pissy male vulnerability tumbling into self-obsession feels like it comes from the same historical moment as say The Singing Detective or the 1980s Martin Amis books

finding i am increasingly turning to this kind of ~~vibes~~ reading, where the inherent flaws of a work are compensated for by the degree it might nail a certain aesthetic or mindset of the time

anyway, Pink Floyd rules and The Wall does indeed also rule

not much of a Floyd fan, most of their albums fall into "I can see why people like it but it's not really my thing" territory but The Wall always seems to convince me that maybe I do really like Pink Floyd

yep, The Wall rules

I particularly prefer the movie rendition of Mother over the album version.

I liked The Wall a lot as a young person, but since then I feel most of the best stuff on it was done better on earlier Pink Floyd albums. I saw the Wall live show a few years back, and it seems Roger Waters stopped concentrating on being a conventional rock singer/songwriter after Animals and became a stage impresario. The theatrical live show really became the centre of his work.

saw the film before I heard the album and I'm still disappointed about that big trial scene being another version & sounding so meh on the album

Yeah that part of the album is the pits. A lot of that last side is awful, but it does have "Run Like Hell." I can't sit through the whole thing, but at least half of it's really good.

AND THE WORMS ATE INTO HIS BRAIN

veg girl

what has become of you?

how can you have any pudding if you don't yeet your schneef

does anybody else in here
feel the way i do

:D

whenever i think i am tired of this album “Goodybe Blue Sky” tells me otherwise

yuuuuuuup

"Goodbye Blue Sky" was the highest placing (at #17) of three Wall tracks on my Pink Floyd Top 30 ILM Poll ballot.

The other two were "Another Brick, Part 1" and "Is There Anybody Out There?" at #'s 29 and 30. Putting "Is There Anybody..." on the list is more than a little challopsy, I'll admit. I definitely burned out on the big tracks from The Wall over the years, and it's interesting that I'm left preferring the 3 most melancholy songs.

Goodbye Blue Sky was my number 8. Also had Young Lust on there, which must have been my attempt at challops or something.

The "Records Revisited" podcast just did a two-plus hour episode on this album. It reminded me how much I love it.

I realize that your perception of this record may depend to a great degree on the context in which you discovered it. For me, it was the soundtrack to my middle adolescence (ages about 15-17). I can't separate it from that time, and it's one of the best associations I have with what was in general a pretty shitty time of my life.