It's a Tuesday rotation thing

[Dusty Chalk]

Hey, one question for folks on Animals. So, the album is excellent and all. But, you know, it really only has four songs on it. And yes the songs go on for a long time and have a lot of atmosphere, but they don't really have more ideas in them than many other shorter songs of similar quality. It seems to me that with an album like Wish You Were Here or Animals, Pink Floyd is really creating full length albums that substance-wise, are EPs. Good for them, but what do you think about the difference between an excellent album like Animals or WYWH with four real songs, compared to an album with 10 great songs of the same length? Are you getting less. I have no grand conclusion here, but I wonder what you think. I guess for me, I really like it, but it is like listening to half an album for me, even with its respectable 40 minute length.

OTOH (on the one hand), I think you're over-analysing. It's still 40(ish) minutes of music, isn't that all one should care about? Sure, it's played a little more patiently, but to say it's not an album is to say that there are some rules that are being broken. First of all, fog the rules -- in music, even a freakin' mathematician over-analist such as Schoenberg knew when to adhere to his own rules, and when not to. Secondly, unorthodoxy rules! Even if there is some "rule" being broken, isn't it great that they're breaking it?

OTOH, I think this comes from living in the CD age -- we have gotten used to, nee spoiled by, 60+ minute albums, using up a significant factor of the available technology. And I think this is where the feeling of being "short-changed" is really coming from. I mean, let's take this to the logical extreme -- Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans is only four songs, yet somehow I doubt you feel that it comes across as a "glorified EP". Why? Because the length is more along the lines of today's compact disc albums.

[DariusNYC]

OTOH (on the one hand), I think you're over-analysing. It's still 40(ish) minutes of music, isn't that all one should care about? Sure, it's played a little more patiently, but to say it's not an album is to say that there are some rules that are being broken. First of all, fog the rules -- in music, even a freakin' mathematician over-analist such as Schoenberg knew when to adhere to his own rules, and when not to. Secondly, unorthodoxy rules! Even if there is some "rule" being broken, isn't it great that they're breaking it?

OTOH, I think this comes from living in the CD age -- we have gotten used to, nee spoiled by, 60+ minute albums, using up a significant factor of the available technology. And I think this is where the feeling of being "short-changed" is really coming from. I mean, let's take this to the logical extreme -- Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans is only four songs, yet somehow I doubt you feel that it comes across as a "glorified EP". Why? Because the length is more along the lines of today's compact disc albums.

Not every album with a few long songs has the same effect for me as these Pink Floyd albums. Yes stuffs more "movements" and ideas into their long songs than Floyd does. So there's more there, in a sense. But, that being said, I generally like the 70s Pink Floyd albums a lot better; what's there is usually higher quality. But compare Wish You Were Here with an album of similar quality with 10 songs and I think the latter will just have more to it -- for example, I can listen to it more times without wanting to move on to something else, because there are more different things to latch on to. This is not strictly a criticism, though; nor is it saying that the PF albums shouldn't be this way. These Floyd albums are excellent on their own terms. And they're the right length too. But idea-wise, they are a bit like extra long EPs.

[Troy]

It's a pity this Animals/WYWH/EP discussion is buried in this threaed. I bet there are a lot of opinions on this subject. It's a really interesting question to ponder.

Darius, can you name an "album of similar quality with 10 songs" that we can compare to these Floyd releases?

I like WYWH more than Animals because it feels more artful to me. It feels like a whole album and Animals feels like a collection of 4 disparate songs. The structure of 3 of those songs is very similar, so it's a bit repetitive in that regard. What saves Animals for me is that it rawks more than WYWH. WYWH feels like a sprawling 3 act epic film. I think there are more musical ideas and themes in WYWH. Plenty, considering it's length.

It COULD be argued that there are not enough ideas and musical themes contained on these albums for their length, but it's that atmosphere that you mentioned that always carried the day for the band. And pacing. That's why these are both great albums. They strike a balance between only a few ideas pushed to their conclusion by using the right amount of atmosphere and production.