The Album of the Month:
Echoes, the Best Of Pink Floyd
(EMI)
Released 5th November 2001
"Best Of" Collections are difficult affairs, and so is is this one. For fan and critic alike many questions com to mind: Who defines what is the best music written, performed and produced within over thirty years in the music business? Why take all those songs out of the original context, especially with a band like Pink Floyd, who never did hit singles like the Rolling Stones and whose songs always lived from the overall mood and flow of a whole album? Why mix together songs of four different band line-ups? Critics might see this as just another market-forces-beat-artistic-integrity case of a record company who keeps on scraping the bottom of the barrel, especially with a release date near Christmas. Others will be dissappointed with the tracklist, wondering why "Careful with that Axe, Eugene", "Mother"and "Welcome To The Machine" didn't make it on the album.Surely a Pink Floyd "Best Of." album can't give an answer to all those questions and fulfill all desires and ultimately has to fail. But Echoes fails beautifully.
This is in fact not the first retrospective release by Pink Floyd. In 1971 "A Collection of Antiques and Curious" entitled "Relics" presented tracks from the band's first three albums Piper At the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets and More, their first Singles Arnold Layne and See Emily Play as well as the outake "Biding My Time". In 1981 the Capitol compilation album "Works" portrayed the bands career up to Dark Side of The Moon and in 1985 the not-so-appropriately-titled "A Collection of Great Dance Songs" concentrated on the post-Dark Side of the Moon Albums Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall. After last years release of "Is There Anybody out There? - The Wall Live 1980-81" "Echoes" marks the first career-spanning collection of Pink Floyd's ouvre. It comes as a two disc set (a limited 4 LP vinyl edition is also available), both CD's a filled to the brim with maximum of 78 minutes.
First of all the good news: All the songs and sounds presented here have stood the test of time (with the possible exception of some sounds in Learning to Fly, but hey this is 1987 ;-)) and -surprisingly in some cases- all songs work also out of their original context. Especially the four Syd era tracks feel fresh and powerful as ever, their easy but brilliant and recordings stand well up against the well known Later-Floyd extensive production. Rather to try to arrange the songs in a chronological order (as for example last years the Beatles Collection "1"did) the songs on this album are put together as a collage of Floyd songs, often linked together with crossfades, sometimes just linked through their original sound effects. The new context brings new life to some of the selections: The simple but intense and link between the ringing phone from Another Brick In The Wall into the famous "Ping" of the title track marks the first surprising and uplifting effect. After Waters ode to the absence "Wish You Were Here" fades gently into the windcoda we hear Syd Barret answer:
"Its awfully considerate of you to think of me here And I'm most obliged for you for making it clear that I'm not here."on his last contribution to the Floyd's catalogue "Jugband Blues. His Echo enhances the mood of both songs and provides an new surrounding for Wish You Were Here. The bitter-sweet magnum opus of the Gilmour-led Division Bell album "High Hopes" ends with a majestic steel guitar solo and the division bells ringing when suddenly a bicycle bell and a sense of humor take the listener brilliantly back to the summer of 1967 where Syd Barrett sings an ode to his "Bike".
Sometimes the policy of mixing and crossfading leads to irritating results: "Us and Them" ends apruptly and without the expected "Any Colour You Like" and a strange echo-effect takes the song straight into "Learning to Fly", which just doesn't. Even more difficult for a Floyd fan is the fact that long time Floyd engineer/ producer an trusted back-catalouge-supervisor James Guthrie had to edit some of the longer songs in order to keep the project on the two disc formula. The cuts are -as always with the Floyd- brilliantly done and even for fans difficult to discover. Shine On You Crazy Diamond seems not to suffer from the truncation, but the editing in Echoes hurts the song badly. The five missing minutes are taken from different parts of the 23 minute-opus, all the different sections are represented, but the dynamics of Echoes' last section -one of Floyd's finest moments- are no longer intact. But of course you can live with that truncated version if you have the complete Echoes in all it's full glory in your collection.
This album is not for the fan who has all the albums anyway and quite possibly will buy this one because he ore she wants the collection to be complete. It's a great compilation as a starting point for someone who's trying explore the music of this fascinating band and the best "Best Of" of Pink Floyd's music.
Last but not least the cover design should be mentioned. Storm Thorgerson decided once again (as for the live album "pulse" from 1995) to arrange all those well known Pink Floyd visuals to a collage bits and pieces from the past just like the music on the two CD's. This time he arranged them with a clever "window in window in window" idea: Interior and exterior space melt into a "Floyd-Room". A continuum where a burning men sells records, the moon hangs from the ceiling, two lot souls swim in a fish bowl and pigs can fly.
Tracklist
Disc One
Astronomy Domine
See Emily Play
The Happiest Days of Our Lives
Another Brick in The Wall (Part 2)
Echoes
Hey You
Marooned
The Great Gig In The Sky
Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
Money
Keep Talking
Sheep
Sorrow
Disc Two
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Time
The Fletcher Memorial Home
Comfortably Numb
When the Tigers Broke Free
One Of These Days
Us and Them
Learning To Fly
Arnold Layne
Wish You Were Here
Jugband Blues
High Hopes
Bike
Here's a small collection of the former Albums Of The Month