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With Syd Barrett on his way out, Pink Floyd sounds noticeably like a band without a leader, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still create fascinating psych-rock soundscapes. All of it is audacious and often beautiful (except maybe the animal noises in “Several Species”), but not as strong as Floyd’s most collaborative efforts. Ummagumma is likely the most inaccessible of all Floyd releases, with one disc devoted to (great) live recordings of the band’s simmering jams and the other to experimentation on the part of each individual band member. We’re only at No. 11 and already I feel bad for ranking a great album so low. Rockers like “The Nile Song” sound distinctly out of place, but the band chemistry is great during the jams nonetheless. Unlike The Endless River, this album has the wonderful texture of late ’60s psychedelic fuzz, with lots of gorgeous English-accented folk (“Green is the Colour”) scattered in between. More is a film soundtrack, which explains why it contains a whole lot of ambience, much like The Endless River. Gilmour doesn’t try to replicate Roger Waters’s lyrics or vocals, because there are no vocals (except the ending “Louder Than Words”), so all that’s left is a lot of pleasing atmospheric pieces. The apparent final Pink Floyd album, built around a series of unreleased material from late keyboardist Rick Wright, is another unnecessary release, but at least it’s a pleasant one. As with its predecessor, I’m always aware, even during standouts like “High Hopes” and “Wearing the Inside Out,” that the band is only trying to recapture its old glories, rather than trying something new, as all the best Floyd releases do. The Division BellĪ slight improvement over A Momentary Lapse, but still plenty dated and unnecessary. A Momentary Lapse of Reason sounds like a dated ’80s retread of earlier ideas, boasting a few strong pop numbers (“One Slip,” “Learning to Fly”) marred by a lot of uncompelling nonsense (the groan-worthy “On the Turning Away”) with Gilmour trying to wail like Waters over it all (“Dogs of War”). A Momentary Lapse of Reasonĭavid Gilmour is a fantastic guitarist but a poor substitute for Roger Waters, as this often painful release shows. Let’s begin ranking this fantastic band’s albums, starting with the worst: 15. Every album, even the forgotten ones that don’t stand up beside their best work, is its own experience, with its own ideas worth hearing at least once - and most of them a whole lot more. Across 15 albums, Pink Floyd reinvented themselves repeatedly to create ambitious albums that synthesize psychedelia, jazz, funk, folk, and more into sonic explorations that brilliantly mirror their lyrics and concepts in innovative ways. Pink Floyd’s discography is an unwieldy one - filled with lineup changes, murky concept albums, and directional shifts - but a rewarding one too. An inflatable pig flies above Battersea Power Station in a recreation of Pink Floyd’s Animals album cover | Oli Scarff/Getty Images