Hey there, wait a minute! Before I go off into philological analysis, lemme just mention this here thingie. Remember how this album starts? With about fifteen or twenty seconds of this quiet, accordeon-driven tune that's even barely audible, and then BOOM! that metallic rhythm steps in. Now what I wanted to say was that I've already listened to this record for about twenty or thirty times, but I still get a jump in my chair each time I hear that boom! Now that's what I call absolute psychologic mastership - this Waters was maybe the damn cleverest dude on earth to create the perfect mood on a record and get the people to experience exactly the kind of reaction that they planned beforehand. Of course, that same Waters dude couldn't tell a good melody from an insipid concentrate, but that's just not his forte - you have to take it or leave it.
Actually, the above paragraph pretty much sums up my ideas about The Wall - Floyd's second best-known album and probably the last mega-hit 'art rock' record in the whole business. Needless to say, it is a pure Waters solo album - apart from a couple (not the best) Gilmour collaborations, the music, lyrics, effects processing and conception are all by Roger. Moreover, Rick Wright didn't even take part in the recordings, being fired by Waters somewhere around the time of the album's release due to 'laziness'. Of course, Rick just explained it as another example of Roger's despotism, but I prefer to keep my mouth shut about it - both gentlemen probably had a point. Anyways, Roger is the man here, and I'd initially set my hopes high, because Animals really demonstrated that he could easily showcase his talents without any help from others. Unfortunately, there are just too many songs; even worse, the further it gets the nastier it becomes. The first record of the set is totally brilliant, and at one period I found myself recycling the first CD over and over again even though I had to put on the second one. In my opinion, this first record contains the tightest, cleanest, most energetic and deeply hitting collection of numbers they ever managed to record - maybe even better than Animals. But the second record is a terrifying, desperate letdown - ranging from noodling melodyless 'soft rock' to horrible Gilbert-Sullivan crap. One of the most thrashing disappointments in my life, in fact. So there. Now I think I'll get to continuing this review by dividing the rest of it into three sections, just like I did with DSOTM - concerning the lyrics, the music and the catches. I hope I'll be convincing enough for you, my gentle reader!
I won't really go into discussing this rock opera's subject, you know it already. Let's just say it's interesting, but not terribly profound (the motive of one person's isolation from the world is quite a well-used one) or original (Tommy, in fact, was based on the same plot). Even so, the story of Pink's gradual alienation from the shitty world is built up quite superbly: the dead father, the school bullies and the non-understanding wife themes are tolerable. But the twistings of the story after the wall has been built are lame to the extreme. Exploitation of the omnipresent Nazi themes that takes up most of the second record is so banal (especially when it comes around to 'Waiting For The Worms') that it really makes me doubt Roger's abilities as a 'thinker'. Come to think of it, the man wasn't terribly sharp: throughout all of the Seventies he hadn't been able to come up with a really original philosophic idea or anything like that. And moreover, all of the 'ideas' explored in The Wall were either 'borrowed' from The Who (alienation) or the Kinks (more concrete details like school problems, described in Schoolboys In Disgrace, or the anti-war motives in Arthur).
Ooh, the music. Some of the tunes on the first record are wonderful, and I don't know whether Roger invented them by accident or some good fairy whispered 'em in his ear while he was busy dissolving Wright's contract, but there they are! There's the hit 'Another Brick In The Wall Part II', of course, which everybody knows as 'We Don't Need No Education', and it's a really shattering disco tune with some funky bass and a contemplative solo by Dave. I'm obliged to add, though, that 'Another Brick In The Wall Part I' is hardly worse, with all these echoey guitars coming in and out again and the bass rhythm pounding away in the distance so that the song really really really conveys the impression of 'daddy's flown across the ocean'. I get the vision of a helicopter flying low above the endless ocean waters while playing this song. You? There we go with the 'soundtrackish' Floyd again! There are the stunning ballads 'Goodbye Blue Sky' and the beginning of 'The Thin Ice'. 'Mother' is another great ballad, however, it suffers from being a little too long. The stupid cock rocker 'Young Lust' where Gilmour again assumes the intonation of 'The Nile Song' is so ridiculously bloated that it's absolute fun, and Roger's singing in 'One Of My Turns' as he imitates Pink having a fit might be one of his strongest vocal workouts. My favourite, though, is the painfully desperate ballad 'Don't Leave Me Now' where Pink laments over the departure of his wife. The moment when Roger sings '...why are you running away?' and the song gets heavier with the wailing guitars and synths and Roger groaning his 'ooooooh... babe... oooooh... babe..' is the only moment on any Pink Floyd record that really moves me to tears, just because I think he managed to perfectly capture on record a man's emotions in case of utmost desperation and breakdown. It's simply gorgeous, but...
...yuck! The second record is atrocious! Where are these beautiful ballads or powerful disco rockers? Okay, so it does contain two of Floyd's most famous songs - 'Comfortably Numb' and 'Run Like Hell', but I'm not a fan of either. The first one sounds like mid-Eighties substance-less Elton John: a lot of aura and atmosphere, a cool, but generic and boring guitar solo, and not much of a melody. The second is just a clumsy and erratic 'rocker' that's totally unmemorable; the reason everybody loves it is probably connected to the fact that, for some reason, it's one of Gilmour's favourite songs (asshole), so he plays it at every concert. Apart from that, the only number that approaches 'decent' is the side opener 'Hey You', another desperate ballad, but also overlong and inconsistent. The other tracks are either short filler-type numbers like 'Vera' or the ridiculous 'Bring The Boys Back Home' with Beach Boy Bruce Johnston singing backup vocals, or murky Broadway musical numbers ('The Trial'), or rehashings of the songs already found on the first album ('In The Flesh', an extended variant of the album opener 'In The Flesh?' In the flesh, in the flesh, just calm down). Aaarrrghh. Stupid.
Even the famous Pink Floyd catches - the special effects - are mostly prominent on the first record. Once again, the band shows its absolute mastery of this kind of tricks: the crashing airplanes, the wailings of a baby, the teacher's scolding, the naive 'look mummy there's an airplane in the sky' line, Pink's destruction of TV sets, telephones ringing and hidden messages to Syd Barrett in 'Empty Spaces' - all these things really make the first record come alive, and I don't need no damn movie to make the plot work. But the second record is almost devoid of these things! If you do not count the crowd noises on 'Waiting For The Worms' or the collapse of the wall at the end, there's almost nothing interesting going on. The songs don't mesh well with each other, and the record structure is totally erratic.
Funny, how one record can be so spirit-raising and the other so yawn-inspiring. I really hate giving the album a 7 because I love the first disc so much, but unfortunately it doesn't get sold as two separate albums. I bet you anything, though, that if it did, the sales from the first album would far exceed those of the second one. Why don't they try and experiment and see what happens?
Oh, and one more thing. The movie is a piece of horrible crap. I won't say that it vilifies the concept (especially since Roger supervised every bit of it), but somehow it manages to emphasize all the nasty and gory things and leave out the gentle moments. 'Give the people what they want', of course, and I fully understand that if people want to see blood and nasty stuff, they should get it, but, unfortunately, that mostly reduces the film to a banal piece of popular entertainment with little true artistic value. I'll just say that my bad luck was to get my first taste of Pink Floyd by watching The Wall, and even if I managed not to vomit on the spot, I swore I'd never lay my hands on a Pink record for the following fifteen or twenty years. I broke that oath, of course, and so much the better; but memories of that film still send shivers down my back. What a gross, banal piece of idiotic, cash-oriented production.