STORMY POLEMIC

In spite of the great polemic that raised from all over the world among the critics Pink Floyd's last album Wish you were here", their sales are guiding it toward the fabulous success of the previous long play. For that reason, in two years, when they publish another disk, it is probable that "Wish you were here" still remains to the one it collides in the sales just as it happened with The dark side of the moon". meanwhile, here we present part of the contradictory opinions that loosened.

THE BETTER OF THE GROUP IN ALL THEIR TIME

FRENCH CRITIC

A delivery remarcable, representative of each one of the four elements. A curiosity and an unprecedented choking. An event. The new Pink Floyd, two years and a little more after "The dark side of the moon" that still figures among the best sale positions. And later? ... After, Pink Floyd and another Pink Floyd. A disk that comes out without risks: grandiose and planned climate, absolute sound perfection, overflowing lyricism, superb and imposing vocalizations. A lot of people will feel rapturous, because they have recovered Pink Floyd; a little progressively, a little brutally for moments, they really return, so much musical as lyrically; the sound, in some opportunities, it has won in force.

The guitar of Gilmour becomes more talkative and more aggressive than before, and the base passes from the metronomic thing to the human thing. Roy Harper's wild voice, supported by that of Gilmour, achieves an almost incomparable effect to works previous of the group.

In this album Pink Floyd, appears in an entire new virulence, an aggressiveness with which they seem to react retrospectively to their precedent softness.

Pink Floyd has refused to print to this work a movement that reflects the current state of the spirit of the group exactly, susceptible of an insidious, almost subversive communication. "Wish you were here" won't disappoint the detractors of Floyd, since a total duality concient, that lucidity of a phenomenon is assumed that surpasses the same musicians.

Finally, this disk is the phenomenon Pink Floyd seen and interpreted by themselves, in a vision and magnificent interpretation that become in themselves the element of the phenomenon. "Wish you were here" and "Have to cigar" are two of the best pieces in the group of all the times.

Once again, Waters, Wright, Gilmour and Manson have made the disk that it lacked.

Of "BEST"

A PALE GHOST OF CREATIVITY

ENGLISH CRITIC

Be which fuere the approach from which looks him at it, "Wish you were here" doesn't stop to be inconvincente in spite of its ponderous sincerity, and in almost all the bands sample a critic imagination lack. Everything is very predictable, and it is necessary that one arrives, almost to the force, to the conclusion that during the last two years (or perhaps more) Floyd has remained in a state of suspended animation.

It is really very alarming the fact that they have been so sure of their isolation. While the world rotates more and more toward its self-destruction, Pink Floyd wanders somnambulistically through its starry avenues, of the arm with that pale ghost of the creativity that alone knows how to say he "Wish you werte here". The album is nothing else that that.

The quantity of time that they have dedicated to this disk should not take like a sign of its constant search of the perfection, but like a lack of determination and resolution. The continuous embellecimientos and the effects superelaborados that adorn the album seem absolutely artificial and planned: a series of masks and facades the crucial inspiration lack that affects the whole work to disguise.

There is a thing that becomes clear from the first music moment: "Wish you were here" is not a progression of "The dark side of the moon". in fact, you can consider that in Pink Floyd's material there has not been a real progression from "Ummagumma". The light concept that tries to unify to the album is, essentially, an inventive one rather petulant against the business of the show. The attack doesn't go nothing else there of the arrogance, mainly because of the weaknesses and doubtful letrista qualities that he has Roger Waters, although EMI insists on describing its efforts like "penetrating and significant". One of the bands in those that can be proven all the flaws of the group convincingly is, for example, "Welcome to the machine" that closes the side with an alluvium of electronic effects (the use of Floyd of such techniques through the whole album deploys as much sophistication as a psychedelic band of 1967 trying to make its first conceptual album). In all moment one meets with the same wall of old clichés, the same ones that have marked Pink Floyd's album from "A saucerful of secrets". The atmospheres of "dawn" of Rick Wright were already tedious in that long play. It is incredible that has not still realized that there are many things more than they can be made with a synthesizer, apart from feigning that winds of the time punish the face of the universe. One of the worst things that Wright made lately it was to change its Farfisa for a Mellotron.

As musicians, the members of Floyd have never demonstrated to be big virtuosos, but here the general level of their performances is, without exceptions, extremely poor. David Gilmour could never be descript like a natural guitarist there am inventive, and unfortunately it is enough the time that he occupies in the topics. He plays with obstinate enthusiasm, but everything that makes it is almost always too obvious, only in the introduction of "Have to cigar" the group plays with true vigor, although anyway, that topic is not any spiritual experience; but at least it is a little more convincing than the rest.

Roy Harper that collaborates in some vocal parts, adds a little more than color to a colorless song. The letters of Waters, again are sorely banal; it is simply a type unable of making a direct and very organized attack to the manipulations of the business of the show. A letter example: "They come here, dear boy, you takes a cigarette. You will go very far, to fly high / you will Never die, you will achieve it if you try; all will love you". The topic that him dá names to the -dominated album for an inadequate acoustic guitar and one of the weakest vocalizations in Waters - it is surprisingly light, and almost instantly forgetable. "Year after year, always running in the same place", Waters sings; it is easy to realize how it should be felt.

The only real intent of Floyd to achieve something great that can compete with their last victories it is Shine on you crazy diamond", that is to say the epic title of Waters to Syd Barret's fractured genius. Perhaps have been unavoidable, inside the context of the album and of the lyrical concern of Waters that chose Barret, one of the supreme tragedies of the rock, as terrible example of the committed creative innocence, but finally destroyed by the pressures of the atmosphere. The intensity of the letters of Waters skirts in this case the offensive thing, since trivialised completely what Barret tried to preach.

Sincerely, this is not an album to recommend, although the four movements of the side two have kind of a vitality that is completely absent of the five of the side one. Generally speaking, "Wish you were here" is the well-known panorama of the sound Floyd.

Of "Melody Maker"

OUR OPINION

THE FRUITS OF ONESELF SHIP

Many will find in Pink Floyd's prospective album a too obvious continuity, in relation to the "The dark side of the moon", the previous album: climates, effects, laughs, paragraphs corals, are spring that Pink Floyd uses almost demagogically again; it would be too compassionate to suppose that that is part of the style of the group. It is in fact that factor, so important for the perdurabilidad and growth of a music, the one that this disk ignores; those penetration intents to the interior cosmos demonstrated in the last long plays, were reduced to effect springs that, although they are perfectly achieved, they don't mean one it authenticates progression.

If this long play has appeared in the moment and in the place of "The dark side of the mon." it is probable that has obtained the same adhesion and the same success. This album is, somehow, the same thing that the other but filed, sharp, care. And that many can become a counteractive effect mummifying ideas.

With everything, Pink Floyd's new long play is presented inobjetable musically if a progression was not demanded to the four musicians that integraneste group. It is as if they have licked lips in their own fruits, in that cosmic ship that, the other way around of Yes, they invented to cross the oceans of the mind and the imprecise margins of the fantasy.

The sound land of Pink Floyd's abstract music maybe allows him to digress in that that seemingly are creative darkness, but two years of wait it seems to be a lot of time to elaborate something of great quality but that it seems in the basic thing to the above-mentioned.

To be conceptual is a difficult task in a populated world of speedy searchers of black acetates, of instantaneous successes. But the insistence in that road is maybe what makes them big. How another group The side oscurro of the moon chapter two could have made without moving? Pink Floyd got it; calls himself "Wish you were here".

Published in the magazine PELO N° 67 corresponding to the month of October of 1975