Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
Or in the case of The Flower Kings, you've got about 45 minutes worth good music, and over an hour of futzing around.
I mean, if you've got 75 minutes worth of good music (which seems to happen more in the avant garde or improvisational areas), there's no reason to not put it all out, if you can make it flow well, and not sound overly redundant or repetitive. Like I said, the problem with The DIvision Bell, to me anyway, isn't that there's a lot of "so-so" music, but rather than some of the songs are too similar to each other. I think a couple of those songs maybe should have been dropped (maybe used as B-sides on the singles) and instead they could have used more uptempo music. I think the album could have used more songs like Young Lust or All Lovers Are Deranged.
Of course, one problem you have is, if you're that famous, it's easy to lose objectivity. You pretty much know that no matter what you put it out, there's going to be a segment of the record buying public who are going to eat it up, just because it says "Pink Floyd" on the cover, and you've kinda "done everything you want to" musically, it's hard to know what to do when you've got "nothing to prove". I wonder if Dave passed versions of the album around his friends and associates and said "What do you think? Are there too many ballads on there? Should I change up the feel more from song to song?" or what. Of course, from some stories I've heard, such advice might prove unreliable anyway.
Like I said, I like most of the songs, it's just that all of them together don't quite work as well as the older albums.
If you ask me, it'd have made a great EP, consisting just of the songs that Jeff Beck played on.
I remember when I saw Roger Waters in 1999, the second half of the second set was given over to songs from Amused To Death, and I'm not sure if it was just that I wasn't familiar with the album, or if it was because the actual quality of the music (maybe another pacing issue), I felt like that part of the show dragged miserably. And in fact, come to think, when I watched the DVD from that tour (well, the second leg of the tour, which had a slightly different setlist and band from what I saw on the first leg), it didn't really improve, so maybe it's more the music than the fact that I hadn't really heard most of those songs before.
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