40 Years, Still Breaking The Wall

Ever wondered what makes a “classic band” classic? Have you ever sat down and play records of bands like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, etc. just to analyze the components of what makes them be as magnificent as they are? Even more, how is it that forty, fifty years later their music still as intact and as relevant as ever before? This is the case with Pink Floyd, especially when we think about that four classic albums run that they had in the mid-seventies. Albums like The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals, brought us records that still are in the charts and are, basically, soundtracks of our current lifestyle.

During this run, Pink Floyd was able to gain as much fame as they could, making them get into a fragile state as a band and marking the last few days of the lineup that made tracks like ‘Money’, ‘Wish You Were Here’, and many other classics. Now, Roger Waters, the infamous bass player and composer of the band had one more sleeve under his arm, probably his most ambitious project to date The Wall (Harvest/Columbia). A Rock Opera that brings us different genres and styles of music within the same album and brings us into a journey that Pink Floyd had us accustomed to from their previous work.

This album shows us some of the strongest Pink Floyd tracks from their vast catalog. Tracks like ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2’, ‘Mother’, ‘Young Lust’, ‘Hey You’, the amazing ‘Comfortably Numb’, which has one of the best, if not the best, guitar solo made by David Gilmour, and ‘Run Like Hell’, will give you a solid perspective of what this album is about, but the transitory tracks like ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’, ‘Empty Space’, ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’, ‘Goodbye Cruel World’, etc. make this album a non-skipper; all tracks are as important as the next one in order to make the whole musical concept to make sense.

The performances and production in this album are top-notch, even for today’s standards, and it’s as influential as any other classic Rock band or any other classic album. Now, you may be wondering why a Heavy Metal site is revising an album by a band that is not or has never been considered Metal, but we have to take in perspective how much this album and the career of this band has influenced many Metal bands through all of its sub-genres. The dark tones and realistic sense that Pink Floyd brought with these albums, especially The Wall makes this band one of the most important bands in the history of modern music, and this will obviously influence bands from all the different genres in all of the music spectrum.

The Wall turns forty this year, forty years of genius music that, accompanied with live shows from both Pink Floyd and Roger Waters as a solo artist, makes the experience be an extra-sensory one. If you haven’t heard this album or if you’re about to listen for the millionth time, go ahead and do so, we need to embrace the musical monster of an album The Wall is and rejoice that we’re lucky enough to be able to appreciate this album in our short venture we call life.

WESLIE NEGRON