89. Pink Floyd - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (August 1967)

1. Astronomy Dominé*

2. Lucifer Sam*

3. Matilda Mother*

4. Flaming

5. Pow R Toc H

6. Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk

7. Interstellar Overdrive

8. The Gnome

9. Chapter 24

10. The Scarecrow

11. Bike

A

And so, after a long and gruelling trek, we come to one of my favourite bands. But this isn't the polished, high-concept Pink Floyd of the mid to late 70s, no. This is the dark, strange, childlike world of Syd Barret-era Floyd, and an album so peculiar as to be positively unclassifiable. 

On the one hand, there are many songs here with an immediacy to them. I don't know if you could call them pop, but they do employ pop structures and are relatively short. "Astronomy Domine" kicks things off with a voyage to the edge of the solar system. "Lucifer Sam" is easily the best song ever written about being freaked-out by a cat. And "Matilda Mother" is a wonderful, yet surprisingly dark, evocation of being read a story as an infant. But then you have stuff like "Pow R Toc H" and the mind-bending "Interstellar Overdrive", which drag your consciousness through inexplicable vistas of weirdness. The latter is especially noteworthy for featuring one of the greatest riffs ever recorded, book-ending ten minutes of nigh-formless free jazz experimentation. 

It's really difficult to sum this album up. I guess the music is pretty inseperable from Barret. As the principle songwriter and guitarist at this point, his fingerprints are all over everything. His approach to lyrics is strange, but quintessentially British in its use of nonsense and anti-logic - a sort of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear for the LSD set. But there's a solidity and a darkness to his whimsy, if that makes sense. His songs are about things, and resonate even when it's not entirely clear what he's on about.

Musically, this is probably the most extreme album we've had up to this point. It even makes Freak Out! look sedate. The addition of David Gilmore would smooth some of the rough edges out of Floyd, but at this point there was a sort of "try anything", devil-may-care approach that yielded some enjoyable, but deeply strange, music. One can't help thinking that this album was the genesis of krautrock, featuring as it does strange improvisations reminiscent of Can and Faust. And "Interstellar Overdrive" basically invented noise rock twenty years too early. 

Anyway, this may not be for everybody, but if you're interested in the ultimate psychedelic rock album, I'd say this is it. Set the controls for the heart of the sun.