Pink Floyd - More - Album Review

[Floyd]

Pink Floyd’s third album is also its first without erratic founding member Syd Barrett, and it finds the band leaning heavily on recent addition David Gilmour. The results are wildly uneven, with psych-tinged, pastoral folk ballads pressed up uncomfortably against avant-garde sound experiments. Barrett’s heavy drug use is often cited as a reason for him leaving the band, so it’s richly ironic that their first album without him is the original motion picture soundtrack for More, a French film that depicts the unraveling effects of drug addiction. It’s likely that Barrett’s presence would have made the record a more consistently relevant one, though it’s even more likely that things would have unraveled at the seams. And for all of its flaws, when More hits, it hits hard. “The Nile Song” is a full-steam-ahead rocker that bridges the gap between the reckless abandon of “Interstellar Overdrive” and the beginning of the steadier (though equally fertile) Gilmour/Waters era. If this is as bad at it gets, we’re in pretty good shape.

Track Listing
1. Cirrus Minor
2. The Nile Song
3. Crying Song
4. Up the Khyber
5. Green is the Colour
6. Cymbaline
7. Party Sequence
8. Main Theme
9. Ibiza Bar
10. More Blues
11. Quicksilver
12. A Spanish Piece
13. Dramatic Theme