Pink Floyd

Echoes

Capitol Records

Pink Floyd’s musical explorations have always been strange things. From the stoner-heaven of The Dark Side of the Moon to the horrific world visions of The Wall, Floyd has relished in the opportunity to use music as something more than a brief respite from reality.

That chosen path undoes Floyd’s greatest hits album Echoes, a collection of great songs that rings hollow so contextually out of place. Floyd made a career on its albums, not the relative catchiness of its singular songs. Animals, Wish You Were Here, and Saucerful of Secrets (besides Dark Side and Wall) were all conceptual albums, total creations that worked because they were the sum of their pieces.

To take those pieces and reshuffle them takes something away from the song’s original intent. “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” and “Another Brick in Wall Part 2” are great songs, but without the rest of The Wall to explain their lyrical madness, they hardly seem as impressive. Instead, they seem like singles, just another track on one of Echoes two discs. Moon is similarly pillaged, with Echoes biting “Time,” “Money,” and “Us and Them.”

Most criminal, however, is the appearance of “Wish You Were Here,” easily Pink Floyd’s most emotive song. Taken out of context from that album’s mechanical sound (literally), Floyd’s lament at the loss of a friend in a cold world seems a mere afterthought.

Further undermining Echoes relative effectiveness is a schizophrenic arrangement of songs. Bouncing around chronologically with little regard for what does and doesn’t work, it would seem that producer James Guthrie wheedled Floyd into accepting an arrangement wherein the band would pick the album’s 26 songs, and then Guthrie could be the one to pick them out of the hat when organizing both discs. Thus, songs from The Division Bell, Floyd’s last studio release, are wedged in between tracks from Wall and Moon. What could have been a fascinating timeline of Floyd’s musical progression instead turns into a sodden mess of mismanagement. Madness prevails.

Lest this review turn into a total smashing of a collection of Floyd’s work, it should be noted that most of the songs on Echoes are excellent. There can be no denying that if Pink Floyd had been a group driven by sales of its singles, the 26 selected for Echoes are surely some of the best ones that they’ve done. It is just that Floyd is not a singles-driven group. Its albums were always something more artistic, seemingly created with nothing to spare.

Thus, the only part of the album that really works is the eclectic “other songs” that Floyd and Guthrie found room for. Both “See Emily Play” off the ‘is-this-even-available-anymore?’ See Emily Play and “Arnold Layne” of the Next Projected Sound of 67 are both legitimate, and rare, jewels. That both would be included on a greatest hits album geared to be a moneymaker is a shock.

Songs like “One of These Days,” “Learning to Fly,” “Shine on Your Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-7),” “Astronomy Domine,” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” are brilliant. That they’d all be on one collection is at once an amazing possibility and a confounding conundrum. Echoes is great for what it has, but aren’t these songs better heard in the way that they were meant to be heard?

Despite all of the above, it is difficult to take an entirely dismal view of Echoes. Pink Floyd’s songs are composed and created with such an intense attention paid to the smallest details. That they’d be collected on an accessible double disc seems at first appealing, especially considering how available it makes Floyd to new fans. It might be off-putting to loyalists, but greatest hits albums are often the easiest way for new fans to get into a band.

Accessible or not, for a band so meticulous in its music, Pink Floyd’s Echoes is a disjointed jumble of familiar hits and forgotten favorites. It sounds great, and it would be an excellent collection for other, more pop-oriented, groups. But for a band as groundbreaking as Floyd, Echoes can be nothing more than a legitimate disappointment.