Pink Floyd
Echoes

THE REVIEW

The suite "Echoes", despite being the main track of "Meddle," is placed at the closing of the album (in the LP, it covers the entire second side with its 23 minutes): it's fitting, too effective and immediately captivating, "One Of These Days" to not put it in pole position on "Meddle."

Historically, it is a suite, in the sense that it originated from distinct musical "pieces" that the Floyds then endeavored to unite; however, they succeeded so well that with no abrupt changes in atmosphere or rhythm, but rather continuous evolutions, musically it should be considered a song, albeit stretched to the extreme. It is 1971, and the Floyds have been trying for years (after the phantasmagoric debut in 1967 with "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn," an absolute masterpiece of psychedelia) to give themselves a musical direction suitable to the fact that Syd Barrett and his peculiar musical vision are no longer there.

Through a second album of clear transition ("A Saucerful Of Secrets") with still several ideas and performances by Barrett, a soundtrack ("More," excellent) as the third, a self-indulgent and somewhat tedious fourth double album half-live and half-studio ("Ummagumma"), a fifth in the "let's do it weird" series where brilliance (the cover with the Holstein, the piece "If", some passages of the suite) is freely mixed with forced elements (people frying two eggs in the kitchen, brass fanfares à la Morricone, Gilmour ashamed of singing the first lyrics he composed, doing it in a ridiculous way...) they finally arrive at the musical form that suits them best and will make them billionaires: the atmospheric spatial piece in slow tempo, good for musicians, rock intellectuals, the crazed, but also for the distracted, the superficial, the poppy. It seems like criticism but it is a merit, absolute.

Try making simple, quiet or rather you could say sluggish music seasoned with effects big and small, and manage to get it across to EVERYONE, even my mom. "Echoes" lacks one component to consider it an integral part of the golden era of Pink Floyd: a valid text. Waters had not yet sharpened his poetic vein; the suite talks about underwater landscapes... fantasy indeed and even coarse, nothing to do with the perfect distillations of anger, irony, realism, and visionariness that will thrive in the subsequent "Dark Side Of The Moon."

"Echoes" starts with an electric piano sound filtered by the rotating horn amplifier "Leslie," soon joined by a bed of organ and Gilmour's slide, inaugurating a type of sequence that the Floyd will end up abusing: even today Gilmour, for the beginning of his latest "On An Island," hasn't found anything better: guitar with effects on a "spatial" backdrop, a combination that peaked with "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." After the intro, Wright's vocals arrive, harmonized with Gilmour, beautiful. Unlike the overused intro style I mentioned earlier, this vocal combination will not be repeated in the later, famous works of Pink Floyd, which will see alternate the sweet and full tone of Gilmour or the often wrenching, hoarse scream of Waters. It is a sort of "atmospheric ballad" in which Gilmour's Stratocaster works well and does even better when the piece evolves into a syncopated jam session. The guitarist solos pentatonic, accompanied by the inimitable timbre of the Hammond organ for a few minutes of... Pink Floyd-style blues.

The whole thing progressively, plunges into a well, rather an abyss of effects in keeping with the theme of the lyrics, with Gilmour producing effective seagull cry imitations by moving his piece of metal along the Strato strings, but then "returns," as the instruments played normally resume, joined by a large drone of Synt VCS3, culminating in a gigantic fanfare of arpeggiated electric guitars (four guitars) that lead to the repetition of the vocals by the same Wright/Gilmour duo. Two words about Nick Mason: I've never heard a drummer "hold back" more than him, yet even his limited style is an essential part of the Pink Floyd sound and charm. After this, still evocative, poignant guitar notes, progressively sinking into the tide of effects that "mounts" to close the piece.

For the lovers of Floyd (the majority, myself included) "Echoes" is a blast, perhaps the favorite piece. For the detractors, a notable boredom.