It's kind of absurd how much I like this album, but there's little doubt in my mind that I would not have discovered it had I not listened to it while watching The Wizard of Oz on mute. Pink Floyd belongs to a genre/era of artists for which I don't have much time. Fortunately, by creating this multimedia experience, they significantly expanded their audience. What freaking geniuses.If you're not familiar with this thing, you start the CD just after the Goldwyn-Mayer lion's third roar right at the beginning. Scenes change with the music, lyrics synch with action on the screen, characters walk in time to the beat - it is an astonishing achievement, made even more astonishing by two things:
1) It works when you repeat the disc a second time, which absolutely blows my mind.
2) The music is good. Without the context of the tornado that strikes the Gale homestead in Kansas, I might not have noticed what a wailer Clare Torry is on "Great Gig in the Sky," but a lot of the other songs stand on their own. "Us and Them" and "Eclipse" are as powerful as "Money" is playful. Writing music to correspond to a film made Pink Floyd construct an album instead of a mere collection of songs, and an album that not many musicians could hope to top.
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