Syd Barrett
Barrett

THE REVIEW

A lonely man..

I've always had a fondness for crazy minstrels, those who experiment and live on the edge between wakefulness and sleep, those who travel..

This is not just an album, this is a stream of consciousness, it's a soliloquy, and mind you, a soliloquy and not a monologue, because Syd didn't care a bit if others “got” his message, he sought a meaning for himself, he sought it amongst the stars of the early space travels with his Floyd, he sought it among the acid strings of his guitar and regurgitated it several times before singing it, he blew it out, releasing it slowly, as if he didn't want to communicate it, with a detachment and a romantic, icy, disarming coldness..

Barrett, in not wanting to be understood, ended up being understood, because every nobility of taste and spirit, every form of art, the moment it is expressed, also chooses its listeners, finding participation, drawing its boundaries towards others..

All stylistic devices thus at once keep things distant, create distance, interdict “access,” while they open, throw open the ears of those who are attuned to that discourse.

It becomes almost superfluous to describe the individual pieces of this exquisite, delicate journey into the psyche of a man who sees madness as the most sincere, most true node to trace a line of knowledge. Our Syd, in fact, believed that the brain, like the sensory organs, acted as “mediations” towards the surrounding reality. This belief, while on one hand it led him to an awareness of a total relativism due to the lack of any form of transcendental truth, on the other hand led him to disarrange his cerebral organ, gradually making it “blow up,” with the lysergic trips, with LSD, and more..

This choice of the branch of unconsciousness allowed him to write overwhelming, harsh melodies, from the intro of “Baby Lemonade” that opens the psychoanalysis session, a sinister and cruel sound as if to foretell a non-return from this non-reality, even though the fright seems to vanish immediately, because Syd thrives in this mayhem of sounds, colors, lights and shadows like a goldfish in a glass bowl, he feels perfectly at ease... and with the following tracks, from the tender “Love Song” to “Maisie,” “Gigolo Aunt,” “Waving my Arms in the Air,” it's like witnessing one of those Escher paintings, composed of infinite staircases with no exit, or reading Rimbaud’s poem “Les Voyelles,” thus sealing an ecstatic coming and going, Syd is falling into a well but seems to find enjoyment, since he does nothing to avoid falling ever further down....

These are songs of lascivious and suffering singing, but also arrogant, characterized by a growing, restrained tension that never explodes, just as the melodies, always held back and never straightforward, and just when they're about to be revealed, they are distorted, made ugly and shrouded in nonsense, like jokes of nature, like Zappa's “free-form freak outs.” Yet the author, as mentioned, doesn't want to provide in the text the key that would allow us to dissipate each “darkness” of his soul, and to do so he utilizes a polysemy and an ambiguous perspective that is evident from the lyrics, and he does so simply because he too is living in a state of uncertainty, he too is searching for a meaning, and so he eliminates univocity, representing sensations with a fluid indefiniteness, as happens in dreams, using dreamlike language to express what's dictated by his unconscious.

Judgment day comes, if we want, with “Dominoes,” which I consider, together with the insistent and schizophrenic “Rats,” the true masterpiece of the album; here the words really struggle to come out, they are just barely whispered, as if carefully plucked out with tweezers without causing pain, evoking only the irreversible annoyance of an unresolved chronic pinch, and thus, once and for all, without embellishments or unnecessary jabber, from the tight symbolism and semantic depth emerges a single, unequivocal...

“You and I, you and I and dominoes, time goes by...”