Pink Floyd – A Saucerful Of Secrets

Man, i just threw this on for the first time in years. I assumed it would suck next to my UK Nice Pair. But this A1/B2 Scranton pressing sounds excellent. Imagine that's why they're going for a lot.

Speaking only of this specific pressing and not the SoS album in general - my first copy of this Scranton A1/B2 pressing arrived as an annoyingly-scratched VG copy, and in my disappointment I nearly bought another but reconsidered. This Tower pressing has the same thin, distant and bass-less feel of my US Tower copy of Piper. It's interesting chiefly because of the alternate Hipgnosis cover art - their first, uncredited here - and because having an original US pressing can't be all bad! For those searching for an affordable vinyl version of A Saucerful Of Secrets and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, look for a clean UK copy of A Nice Pair.

Many things have been said regarding and defining A Saucerful Of Secrets, with some suggesting that the record represents a band in tradition, others claim that it shows Pink Floyd walking into the future backwards, while others attempt to suggest at least something good by implying that it’s an inherently whimsical album of psychedelic pop in the fashion of Syd Barrett, on whom the door had nearly closed by this point. And of course there are the diehards will stand there defiantly holding the album in your face saying, “But it’s a critical album in the band’s sonic evolution.” All to whom I question, “When’s the last time you played it?”

No matter what one says, the truth is A Saucerful Of Secrets was very much an underground album of its day, offering up nothing that could pose as a radio classic and moving the band into the Gilmore era. With Gilmore at the helm more or less, Pink Floyd take a decided turn to music defined with a sense of artistic disparity and a more explorative progressive style.

Of course the album’s center piece was the immerse-ifly driven opus “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun,” a sonically disorienting montage of blended sound effects, a haunting dissociative Mellotron, with Gilmore saying in a 1993 interview for Guitar Word Magazine, “I don’t think the band really knew quiet where we wanted to go after Syd’s departure. ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’ was a very important adventure, it gave us our direction forward. If you take the songs ‘Saucer,’ ‘Control,’ ’Atom Heart Mother’ and ‘Echos,’ they linearly and logically lead straight to the album Dark Side Of The Moon.” All greatness rise from some primordial pool, so while this adventure may have been an important step for the band, why is it that so many listeners latch onto the ooze and hold it as the diamond it’s not.

Birth is not necessarily the most beautiful thing, and the album is certainly laced with far too much filler, while in the same breath we come face to face with the personal inherent individual struggles of each of the individual band , the essences of things that shattered and defined their lives as young men, and would continue to be explored for the next fifty years, until they figured out that they’d rehashed it all without ever achieving peace, and once it got entirely boring for them, they realized that they’d built a career around these internal struggles for so long that they eventually had nothing else to say.

Now … Barrett does resound on three tracks, all of which are rather chilling and prophetic, though none more than “Jugband Blues,” a song that underlines his sense of departure and alienation, with the most oblique manifestation being that Syd seemed to be moving in this direction either purposely or out of necessity, though either way, Syd seemed entirely aware of his situation and his inability to change his com setting. Of course all this was unknown to listeners back in the mid 60’s, where we were intent on exploring the nature of our own beings, and the music of Pink Floyd merely ebbed as a backdrop to our own lysergic dreams and emancipations … though perhaps it should have shined like a beacon, a warning of rocks on the horizon, with Barrett ending the track with the lines “What exactly is a dream, and what exactly is a joke.” With the line being said without the punctuation of a question mark, more as a statement of fact in a never ending struggle to define sanity in an insane world.

Strangely enough, this is the only Pink Floyd album that features all five of the band’s due to the recording dates. And while Syd was still in attendance, gone was his sense of the whimsical, with the album coming off with a dark foreboding atmosphere of gloom; perhaps one of the reasons I was not inwardly drawn to it.

Oddly enough, over the decades A Saucerful Of Secrets became less about the music and more about defining the nature of the times, the band, and the misuse and overuse of drugs during the psychedelic 60’s. Truth be told, the record is that of a transitional one, certainly not something that could have been avoided by the band, but certainly not a body of work we should take as a cohesive production that in any manner defined Pink Floyd as we’ve come to know them. Without a doubt, there is some dynamic material to be found here, meaning what’s good is inviting good, and what’s bad is easily discarded, suggesting that the best material found here can be appreciate more as a collection, as part of a compilation album.

*** This is an album people rate highly, and to that I’d ask, “Is it as good as Dark Side Of The Moon, or even Wish You Where Here? And if not, why is the same love shown, or are music fans simply unable to put a finger down and say for all this album is or isn’t … it’s not that good, it’s nearly part of a breath that moved Pink Floyd into a special realm for awhile.”

Review by Jenell Kesler

Can anyone here please identify what the first pressing of this album looks like? at pinkfloydarchives.com it shows the brown tower labels with the song titles centered and not under the T, though I've never seen them that way anywhere. Also, discogs shows this 2nd press, but where is the first? Thanks. Here's the PFA link with the labels I'm referring to.

http://pinkfloydarchives.com/Discog/US/LP/SOS/SOS1/labels.jpg

Hello. Can anyone tell me whether or not a copy that... has the IAM triangle stamped on both sides, but has ST1-5131-A1 etched on side 1, and ST2-5131-A1 etched on side 2, is a legitimate copy of this album? Thank you.

Unlike Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Tower did not change the running order on Pink Floyd's second LP. This record plays very well and has a deep sound. The front and back cover of the album cover is a bit brighter. i can see Roger Water's face more clearly. This album is a crossfade between the Barrett era and the Gilmour era that followed. Barrett played on some of the tracks, like a Day, Set Controls for the Heart of the Sun, and the coda Jugband Blues. Gilmour plays on the balance. Essentially this is a rare document of Pink Floyd as a 5 piece band. I find it colder and more spacey than Piper, but no less enjoyable.

Hi, my copy has ST1-5131-A1 etched on side 1 and ST2-5131-B2 etched on side 2, and the IAM stamped in the triangle. Is that the same release as this?