Though it in no way endangers the meisterwerk musical status of Dark Side of the Moon (still on the charts nearly seven years after its release), Pink Floyd's twelfth album, The Wall, is the most startling rhetorical achievement in the group's singular, thirteen-year career. Stretching his talents over four sides, Floyd bassist Roger Waters, who wrote all the words and a majority of the music here, projects a dark, multilayered vision of post-World War II Western (and especially British) society so unremittingly dismal and acidulous that it makes contemporary gloom-mongers such as Randy Newman or, say, Nico seem like Peter Pan and Tinker Bell.
The Wall is a stunning synthesis of Waters' by now familiar thematic obsessions: the brutal misanthropy of Pink Floyd's last LP, Animals; Dark Side of the Moon's sour, middle-aged tristesse; the surprisingly shrewd perception that the music business is a microcosm of institutional oppression (Wish You Were Here); and the dread of impending psychoses that runs through all these records -- plus a strongly felt antiwar animus that dates way back to 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets. But where Animals, for instance, suffered from self-centered smugness, the even more abject The Wall leaps to life with a relentless lyrical rage that's clearly genuine and, in its painstakingly particularity, ultimately horrifying.
Fashioned as a kind of circular maze (the last words on side four begin a sentence completed by the first words on side one), The Wall offers no exit except madness from a world malevolently bent on crippling its citizens at every level of endeavor. The process -- for those of Waters' generation, at least -- begins at birth with the smothering distortions of mother love. Then there are some vaguely remembered upheavals from the wartime Blitz:
In government-run schools, children are methodically tormented and humiliated by teachers whose comeuppance occurs when they go home at night and "their fat and/ Psychopathic wives would thrash them/ Within inches of their lives."
As Roger Waters sees it, even the most glittering success later in life -- in his case, international rock stardom -- is a mockery because of mortality. The halfhearted hope of interpersonal salvation that slightly brightened Animals is gone, too: women are viewed as inscrutable sexual punching bags, and men (their immediate oppressors in a grand scheme of oppression) are inevitably left alone to flail about in increasingly unbearable frustration. This wall of conditioning finally forms a prison. And its pitiful inmate, by now practially catatonic, submits to "The Trial" -- a bizarre musical cataclysm out of Gilbert and Sullivan via Brecht and Weill -- in which all of his past tormentors converge for the long-awaited kill.
This is very tough stuff, and hardly the hallmark of a hit album. Whether or not The Wall succeeds commercially will probably depend on its musical virtues, of which there are many. Longtime Pink Floyd fans will find the requisite number of bone-crunching riffs and Saturn-bound guitar screems ("In the Flesh"), along with one of the loveliest ballads the band has ever recorded ("Comfortably Numb"). And the singing throughout is -- at last -- truly first-rate, clear, impassioned. Listen to the vocals in the frightening "One of My Turns," in which the deranged rock-star narrator, his shattered synapses misfiring like wet firecrackers, screams at his groupie companion: "Would you like to learn to fly?/Would you like to see my try?"
Problems do arise, however. While The Wall's length is certainly justified by the breadth of its thematic concerns, the music is stretched a bit thin. Heavy-metal maestro Bob Ezrin, brought in to coproduce with Roger Waters and Guitarist David Gilmour, adds a certain hard-rock consciousness to a few cuts (especially the near-funky "Young Lust") but has generally been unable to match the high sonic gloss that engineer Alan Parsons contributed to Dark Side of the Moon. Even Floyd-starved devotees may not be sucked into The Wall's relatively flat aural ambiance on first hearing. But when they finally are -- and then get a good look at that forbidding lyrical landscape -- they may wonder which way is out real fast.
- Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone, 2/7/80.
Bonus Reviews!
The first Pink Floyd album since 1977's Animals is a double-pocket concept album with the title apparently symbolic of the separation between performer and audience. There are other analogies that can be made as to the wall's meaning, yet one thing remains constant and that is Floyd's ability to produce interesting music. There's a lot of music contained here, most songs rather short and running the gamut from mainstream textured rock tunes to rather esoteric tracks with voice overs, electronics and orchestral backing. For the first time, Floyd has used a major name producer in Ezrin, who has previously worked with Alice Cooper and Kiss. Ezrin's contributions give the work a unifying thread. As usual, Roger Waters' lyrics are a standout and the playing is tight. Look for a Pink Floyd tour of America early next year. Best cuts: "The Thin Ice," "Mother," "One Of My Turns," "Hey You," "Comfortably Numb," "Nobody Home," "The Trial."
- Billboard, 1979.
For a dumb tribulations-of-a-rock-star epic, this isn't bad -- unlikely to arouse much pity or envy, anyway. The music is all right, too -- kitschy minimal maximalism with sound effects and speech fragments. But the story is confused, "mother" and "modern life" make unconvincing villians, and if the recontextualization of "up against the wall" is intended ironically, I don't get it. B-
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
It's overlong, and won't bear close scrutiny, either musically or (especially) lyrically, but, it is listenable. The Wall is the pinnacle of English art rock at the end of the decade. Yet, this is a band that understands the art of the recording studio with more acumen than most; thus, if only on a sonic level, it succeeds. The CD adds marvelous dynamics, clarity of detail, and stage/depth to all the ingenious sound effects. B
- Bill Shapiro, Rock & Roll Review: A Guide to Good Rock on CD, 1991.
With The Wall Pink Floyd again found a powerful "story line" for their music -- or as it was becoming increasingly obvious Roger Waters' music. Taking "alienation of the rock star" as its basis The Wall brings up Floyd's production big guns. The wall of the title is the wall built up around the person by bitterness and brutality.
A spectacular recording of hard hitting rock and ballads uses every signal processing trick and incorporates a sequence of unsurpassed sound effects including helicopters and exploding TV sets.
"Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)" sets a remarkably high standard for sound quality with its playground effects, deliciously fluid deep bass and heart-stopping dynamics; the percussion gets one of the cleanest recordings on CD. The most dramatic sound however comes in the track "Young Lust" in the recreation of a large acoustic space only hinted at in LP reproduction.
- David Prakel, Rock 'n' Roll on Compact Disc, 1987.
This is Roger Waters's two-disc meditation on the travails of a rock star, whose unhappy life causes him to build a psychological barrier between himself and the rest of the world. Contains the #1 hit "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" and the concert favorite "Comfortably Numb" (cowritten by David Gilmour). * * * * *
- William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
The Wall is another masterful Pink Floyd concept piece that, despite its length, housed solid songs such as "Comfortably Numb," "Goodbye Blue Sky" and their biggest hit, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)." * * * * *
- Gary Graff, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.
Rock opera meets seminal songwriting on this brilliant but alienating magnum opus, a double-album journey through the tortured mind of a star losing touch with his audience. A bold, forceful move forward, this cathartic crown jewel earned Pink Floyd their third U.S. No. 1. Such music from the depths of despair revealed Roger Waters at his insane best, and it gave every stoner kid a passport to another reality. Still, a handful of Wall-bangers find it patchy and pretentious. * * * * *
- Zagat Survey Music Guide - 1,000 Top Albums of All Time, 2003.
Pink Floyd's most elaborately theatrical album was inspired by their own success: the alienating enormity of their tours after Dark Side of the Moon, which was when bassist-lyricist Roger Waters first hit upon the wall as a metaphor for isolation and rebellion. He finished a demo of the work by July 1978; the double album then took the band a year to make. Rock's ultimate self-pity opera, The Wall is also hypnotic in its indulgence: the totalitarian thunder of "In the Flesh?" the suicidal languor of "Comfortably Numb," the Brechtian drama of "The Trial." Rock-star hubris has never been more electrifying.
The Wall was chosen as the 87th greatest album of all time by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine in Dec. 2003.
- Rolling Stone, 12/11/03.
Main Page |
The Classic 300 |
Readers' Favorites |
Other Seventies Discs |
Search The RockSite/The Web