Review Summary: The first soundtrack of the band. Their first work without Syd Barrett.
“More” is the third studio album of Pink Floyd that was released in 1969. The line up on the album is David Gilmour, Richard Wright, Roger Waters and Nick Mason. The album had also the participation of Lindy Mason.
Pink Floyd is a British progressive rock band that was formed in London in 1965, after several changes in the line ups and in band’s name. As Pink Floyd, the band became a quartet with Syd Barrett, Richard Wright, Roger Waters and Nick Mason. They started as a psychedelic band under the leadership of Barrett. The band released their debut work “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” in 1967 and the second one “A Saucerful Of Secrets” in 1968. After Barrett left the band due to drugs, Waters took over the band and led Pink Floyd, more and more in the direction of a total work of space art.
“More” is a psychedelic rock album that contains some acoustic folk ballads, a genre that appeared sparsely on Pink Floyd’s later works. It also contains several instrumental tracks, featuring their experimental and avant-garde approach. It was composed as a soundtrack for a film with the same name, directed by the Franco-Swiss film director and producer Barbet Schroeder. “More” was the first full length soundtrack album of Pink Floyd, also released in the same year, and it was also the first time that they worked with this film director. Three years later, in 1972, Pink Floyd were once again invited by Barbet Schroeder to compose another soundtrack for a new film called “La Vallée”, that would result in a new Pink Floyd’s album, their seventh studio album “Obscured By Clouds”. This is Pink Floyd’s first full album without founding member Syd Barrett. On their previous work “A Saucerful Of Secrets”, he appears on one track.
As film music, “More” has, therefore, concessions to the film, which means that it has partly pieces that are simply intended to accompany scenes from the film. So, as can be easily understood, it’s a bit difficult to separate the music from the film. Nevertheless, the album “More” creates a concise overall mood. The story told by the film “More” is, in short, a hippie tale and the music is the fragrant Woodstock hippie music at its finest. Some songs on the album have relatively little volume. A lot of it is acoustic. The percussions are often more dabbed than beaten. In the background the organ wafts gently or birds chirp, in the ambient of those days. Now and then the music goes on a psychedelic journey. “More” is good film music and, like no other album by the band, spreads a dreamlike hippie atmosphere, which was absolutely contemporary at the time and that arouses a lot of nostalgia even today in many older fans of the band.
“Cirrus Minor” is a slow beautiful and relaxing song that begins with Waters’ acoustic guitar and ends with a superb keyboard solo of Wright. “The Nile Song” is one of their heaviest songs. It’s an enjoyable hard rock song with nice guitar solos. Gilmour screams instead of singing, which isn’t nice to hear. “Crying Song” is a nice soft ballad, basically an acoustic guitar song, nice and pleasant to hear. “Up The Khyber” is a short instrumental with a cool drum beat and where Wright plays piano in a jazz style. It’s strange but nice too. “Green Is The Colour” is a soft song full of simplicity and beauty. It’s a mellow acoustic ballad with enjoyable guitar and piano works. “Cymbaline” is a nice song with good vocals that ends beautifully with a great keyboard work providing the track a nice closing. “Party Sequence” is a brief psychedelic song, basically with bongos and flute. It’s irrelevant to the album. “Main Theme” is an instrumental with nice moments. It’s a psychedelic song exploring electronic effects. It’s one of the best songs on the album. “Ibiza Bar” is a rock song in the vein of “The Nile Song”. It shows some of the earlier sounds of the future heavy metal sound. Again, Gilmour screams instead of singing. These are two similar songs. “More Blues” is, as its name indicates, a blues song. It’s short, with nice bluesy guitar and cool drumming. “Quicksilver” is an incursion into the electronic music and experimentation. It’s a good psychedelic atmospheric instrumental, very Floydian. It has great keyboards in Tangerine Dream’s style. “A Spanish Piece” is a kind of a joke of Gilmour. I’m not a great fan of it. I think it’s useless to the album. “Dramatic Theme” is an atmospheric enjoyable instrumental that ends the album very well. It’s close to “Main Theme”.
Conclusion: Unlike “La Vallée”, a film that I saw once in the cinema when I was a teenager, as far as I can remember, I never had the opportunity to see the film “More”. However, the fact I haven’t see the film isn’t an obstacle to review the album. “More” has interesting moments but it isn’t well balanced. It isn’t a bad album, but it seems to me more a bunch of experimental and psychedelic tracks than a real cohesive work. Like “Obscured By Clouds”, and “Ummagumma”, “More” isn’t one of the best and most representative albums of Pink Floyd. And it seems the film wasn’t particularly successful too. But, despite “More” isn’t a masterpiece this is an album with interesting moments that spread well the dreamlike hippie atmosphere. So, “More” is an important music document well representative of the end of the 60’s.
Music was my first love.
John Miles (Rebel)
