253. Pink Floyd, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"

 

Syd Barrett's crowning (well, only) achievement with Pink Floyd, this 1967 release has been hailed as a psychedelic masterpiece and a visionary recording, which is great because I fucking hated it.  OK, maybe that's too strong.  I really did not like it at all.  It combines all the worst parts of jazz and endless noodling and bad singing and unfinished songs into one painful package.  It is truly hard to believe that the band that did this put out something like The Dark Side of the Moon five years later.

I must admit, my exposure to early Pink Floyd has been extremely limited - I do like the song "Fearless" from Meddle, a few years after this album - and it's always hard evaluating something I'm not super familiar with and am immediately turned off by but this is just so not in my wheelhouse that it's hard for me to be objective.  There's some stuff that I kind of liked, like the descending bassline on "Lucifer Sam," which starts out sounding like the theme song to a cool British spy show from the late 60's and doesn't get completely worse when the vocals start.  There's some really cool percussion on "The Scarecrow" but it gets lost in a too-busy melody.  But most of it gets a no from me, dog.

Look, I know I'm an outlier here.  Every review I read of this album ranged from positive to worshipful, so it's not lost on me that I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Hey, I'm just calling them like I see them.

Syd Barrett would, of course, descend into madness and isolation, his mind ruined by a combination of psychedelics and probably schizophrenia.  He died in 2006 in Cambridge, having lived out the rest of his days on royalties from his contributions to the band.  Arthur Schopenhauer famously said, "Genius and madness have something in common: both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else."  Syd Barrett proved that.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? No.