voiceface

I don’t agree with many of the things that have been written in the review, starting with the judgment on the album, which I share in quantity but not in quality. This record is intrinsically innovative in sound, or at least absolutely original; you can invoke Pink Floyd and Talking Heads all you want, but the sounds of Zooropa are absolutely unique and perfect for the melodies constructed by the band. More than anything, it’s the songs that don’t quite live up to the sound. Secondly, Achtung Baby is definitely a masterpiece, and I would even meet you halfway on The Joshua Tree, which is slightly overrated, like the entire work of Bono and company, after all. Finally, justifying the success and merits of U2 with big-name producers is reductive and doesn’t correspond to reality. On the other hand, the same U2 producers have produced lesser works, and the same U2 have managed to excel with different producers: therefore, there is no certain link between the success of a project and a great producer.

transitional album, a slight misfire of The Wall, of just slightly lesser quality, and a look at what later became Waters' solo career. Definitely not up to par with the previous albums (the trilogy of the dollar as the Floyd purists call it :-) ) but an essential album to understand Waters and the end of Pink Floyd.

Yes, it's true, I wanted to say that they didn't stick to just one genre reference, but they gave their best by comparing themselves to many ways of making music.

One might wonder what genre The Smashing Pumpkins belong to... across their five albums, they have transitioned from the post-grunge sound of Gish to the symphonic rock of SD and MC&IS, to the electronica of Adore, and finally to the hybrid rock of Machina: an exceptional band that, fortunately, has had no reference genres.

Supporting the end of Waters as a composer in '72 is the result of a very personal interpretation of Pink Floyd's work, to say the least debatable: it implicitly suggests that Obscured by Clouds is, from a compositional standpoint, a better work than Wish You Were Here or even The Wall; in a way, it compares the most purely psychedelic period (up to Ummagumma) with the most personal period of the Floyd (from TDSOTM to TW) where they truly produced music that cannot in any way be traced back to other experiences; it seeks to deny the songwriting capacity that undeniably finds its apotheosis in The Wall. In short, one might prefer the pre-'72 period over the post-'72, but to say that Waters ran out of steam in '72 seems paradoxical to me; if anything, it was his companions who ran out of steam, and I would be inclined to agree on that.

"Waters finished as a composer in '72"... I would really like to understand such a metric of judgment, but I already know that I will never get there...

I would really like to know which of X's stratagems you consider beautiful pieces... I'll take a wild guess: Between sex and chastity, the smell of gunpowder and hermeneutics, tell me if I guessed right...

In this album, there’s a sense of something good, yet fundamentally the record is listenable at most two or three times, after which it’s destined to gather layers of dust... the reason eluded me for a long time, until Bono revealed the mystery to me: it was released too quickly because they were behind schedule for the already planned tour. And for a band that believes itself and is believed to be a milestone of rock, that doesn’t really do them much honor.

I will never understand the enthusiasm for REM, who surely give their best in this album, but still far light-years away from the "true" masterpieces of rock.

I quite agree, although I find the criticism somewhat unfair... after all, Sarcofagia and La quiete dopo un addio are excellent pieces.