I was hipped to this disc by one of my female housemates, when I asked for her favorite Floyd record. I instantaneously liked the fact that it wasnt Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall. At the time, I was only passingly familiar with either of them, but the 22-year-old me wanted very much not to run his plow through fields already well-furrowed. So for a while, this was my favorite Floyd record (before you ask, of course I own Dark Side and The Wall. But they're on vinyl, so I won't be rating them here).
Certainly, Meddle has a subtlety that the other records lack. Pink Floyd may or may not have been the proggiest of prog-rock bands, but at their noodliest they clung lived to a Go-Big-Or-Go-Home aesthetic. So the very non-operatic nature of a lot of these songs, the un-thematic-cycle of them, can throw listeners for a loop. Compared to Wish You Were Here, this is just a collection of songs. And not a mind-blowing collection of songs, at that. But there's a strange spirit to them all, that oddly binds them together without any lyrical or structural commonality (such as I have noticed).
We begin with "One of These Days," which starts with the sound of a blizzard and builds to a frosty mastodon of a rocker, heavy as a glacier and twice as slick. The only lyric, a distorted "One of these days I'm going to knock you into next week," seems to hint with its irony on what it would mean to actually be punched forward into a different time. This is followed by a "Pillow of Winds," which sounds exactly like a song with that title should sound. It seems to be about naptime, and I can think of no better tune to want to drift off to.
And then comes one of my favorite songs of the entire Pink Floyd catalogue. "Fearless" is built on a blues riff that neither blisters nor threatens nor does any of the other cock-rockery that Jimmy Page or Keith Richards would make it do. It just commands your attention, building and dropping off and building again, letting its own inevitability supply the tension without any sonic tricks. I don't know what made the band append a music-hall rendition of Oscar & Hammerstein's "You'll Never Walk Alone" to the end of the track, and I don't know why it seems to work.
After that, "San Tropez" and "Seamus" both seem to be odd left turns. The former seems to walk the same lyrical territory as "Margaritaville," with a bit more intelligence and without the dissolute catchphrase. The latter seems like a solo in search of a proper song. But again, I'm not complaining. The songs do what they do, and the effect is pleasant, even bracing.
"Echoes" may be the album's real goal, a sprawling soundscape, deceptively energetic. It starts like "Pillow of Winds, Pt. 2," but without too much fuss or bother goes somewhere else. The vocals, referencing "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," never fail to take me by surprise when they come in, and as they build, the band seems to find the precursor "Eclipse" at the end of Dark Side. Afterwards, a crunchy funk suite is slowly abandoned for a further exploration of the spaced-out rhythmns of the center movement of "Interstellar Overdrive." But instead of retreating from the void, the band plants their flag their, building everything up until the vocals com back, calling to us from across the sky.
I don't know this album half as well as I ought to, and I don't think I ever will.
Grade: LL
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