The eighty-ninth album: #89 Pink Floyd - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
With more psychedelic rock/proto punk, we can an early Pink Floyd album. I certainly know them from their later songs, but here I feel I hear elements of those performances already (Syd Barrett is still a part of the group here, doing most of the writing, but I guess a lot of it still carries over). There's something dark in them, a bass riff driving songs like Lucifer Sam relentlessly forward. While a lot of the lyrics and musinc steers into the fantastic, there is a dark undertone driving it all that really set up the layers for me.
This bcomes more apparent in the instrumental pieces, which seem to emphasize the dark undertones and weird sounds, making them unnerving and at times barely songs. It's creepy, it's weird and unsettling, and the idea that these were made from LSD trips is clearer than ever - even if most of the time, that wasn't true. By Interstellar Overdrive, I felt some of these were upsetting, but they also stayed compelling - I suppose it's a credit to the band that they pulled this off so well. Of course, then you get The Gnome, a standard sweeter rocky ballad. Lovely, but quite a change from what came before. It's a bizarre album, experimenting with some different styles, but mostly succesful at what it tries to do.