Meddle is a monumental Pink Floyd album and their first that at least mostly lands on its feet after the departure of Syd Barrett. Still, it’s not completely consistent, but its low points aren’t particularly bad. After the first two albums took extreme cues from Barrett’s song-by-song styling, the third and fourth were more experimental, making a lot more sense as a whole. They also seemed like attempts to replicate Syd’s presence. In 1971, they let go of Syd, but went back to the song-by-song formula. What we get is a fluid and stand out album that shows the group not getting too caught up with themselves, while also showing technical proficiency.
Meddle’s a-side is casual and light, playing with blues, psychedelia, folk, and other genres, all masterfully handled by the vocals and guitar. The vocal and guitar textures really make this album, mostly handled by David Gilmour. The more space rock the group was post-Syd, the more desperate they seemed to justify keeping the band name after losing the person who was so adept at space rock and by extension their sound. David does his own thing finally. The others follow suit, backing this newer idea. In the past, the group had prominent bass, keyboard, and drums. A criticism you could levy here is that they take a backseat. Despite that, they’re extremely solid.
“One of These Days” is a great mix of building atmosphere, rocking out, and driving guitars. The track is constantly throwing appropriate new sounds into the mix. It could theoretically be criticized for going for that older, jam-based angle, especially as the opener, but it makes such a strong impression and is so enjoyable that it really works. It is a little jarring compared to the next four tracks, which are comparatively so light. Driving drums and the keyboard are nice nods to the older style and rock in general, making for a fusion style that doesn’t let you forget you’re listening to a rock record.
“Echoes” was apparently culled from a lot of different musical ideas over the years and it does sound like it. It comes off as incoherent at points, with awkward pacing and jumps to different sections of the piece. Some of the more ambient-inspired portions seem like they’re being played too slow or with pressure to suggest it’s supposed to be big and epic. The descending riff is an example of the latter. The volume is too low, with the instruments at times feeling muddled and indistinguishable. It’s easy to imagine it was forced to be as long as possible for the purpose of being a grand finale. It also doesn’t tonally fit with the lighter, earlier tracks, but that’s admittedly a minor complaint. The great Syd-era instrumentals generally said, “What can we do with this particular musical idea?” and explored it in different ways. This track feels like an attempt to replicate that, with the aforementioned multi-sourced elements failing that.
Despite the criticism of “tone”, it’s possible that the side-a style would not have been as consistently high quality for an entire album. It would’ve been better to try something different, like using some of the highlights from the next record, Obscured by Clouds.
OVERVIEW
While I praised this album for being more “original”, it is not entirely. Syd Barrett had been dabbling quite a bit in psychedelic folk, which paints “A Pillow of Winds” and many others. It’s hard to say for sure what makes this album work so much better than previous, but it seems it’s likely that the guitars are not Syd-like. They’re David Gilmour and Roger Waters-like. This 1971 effort will prove to be an oddity. The band will soon return to their original goal of “blowing you out”, which they tried from 1968-1970. The difference is that they’ll succeed. Whether or not Meddle played any part of that is up for debate. You can hardly shake it on its own merits, though.