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Progressive Rock CD Reviews

Pink Floyd More Review by Gary Hill This album was a soundtrack album from Pink Floyd. The thing is, other than a few instrumental pieces that feel like soundtrack music, it’s hard to tell that. Honestly, it is a great Pink Floyd album, even if you don’t know the whole soundtrack thing. This is exactly the kind of thing you expect from them. Well, at least the kind of thing you expect from that period of the band’s career. This review is available in book format (hardcover and paperback) in Music Street Journal: 2015 Volume 1 at lulu.com/strangesound.

Track by Track Review

Cirrus Minor Chirping birds and other sounds of nature open this piece. That holds it for the first minute or so. Then acoustic guitar brings the slow moving, psychedelic rock song proper into being. After the vocals are done, the keyboards take over, working it through more moody psychedelia.

The Nile Song This is a real hard rocker. It’s got a lot of screaming psychedelic power and fuzz. This is still recognizable as Pink Floyd, but also different.

Crying Song A gentle, gliding kind of bit of mellow psychedelia, this is pretty. I love the acoustic guitar and the keyboard elements on it. The guitar solo is signature David Gilmour, too.

Up the Khyber Now, this is something completely different. It’s a rather crazed and often unsettling combination of jazz and psychedelia. As weird as it is, it’s also somehow compelling. It’s the first instrumental here.

Green Is the Colour This bouncy little number is quite psychedelic. I like the piano and the flute on it quite a bit.

Cymbaline I’ve always loved this song. It’s got a lot of progressive rock in the mix. The chorus is powerful and a bit catchy. Yet, the verses are mellower and more down to Earth. The combination is full of magic. This is a real Pink Floyd classic in so many ways. The keyboard based jam at the end seems tied to the space psychedelia for which early Floyd is so well known.

Party Sequence A percussion workout starts this and they move out toward world music on top of that. It never becomes fully realized, though, just remaining drums and flute. It’s just over a minute long.

Main Theme This extensive instrumental is based on the same kind of spacey psychedelia that makes up a piece like “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” This is trippy and dynamic (shifting between mellower and more rocking throughout) and also trademark Pink Floyd.

Ibiza Bar A harder rocking jam, this is energized and cool. It’s psychedelia for sure.

More Blues This guitar dominated jam does have some blues in it, but it’s more echoey psychedelia in a lot of ways.

Quicksilver Coming out of the previous piece, this is noisy in bursts at first. It’s like percussive space music with less emphasis on the music part. Eventually, drums rise upward, seeming about ready to herald a more song like structure. Instead, though, it just drifts toward more musical space. It shifts toward more freeform sparse psychedelia as it continues. It eventually gradually fades away to end.

A Spanish Piece There is a spoken voice in like from a bad Mexican movie here. Beyond that we get some Spanish guitar.

Dramatic Theme This instrumental features a lot of guitar soloing. It’s a somewhat spacey bit of Floydian psychedelia.

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