Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here - Experience Version - Amazon.com Music

Wish You Were Here is frequently referred to as the best Pink Floyd album, by fans and by half the band. It isn't my favorite, but I would still put it somewhere in the top 5 out of the 15 Floyd official studio albums.
It contains one of the greatest elegies in classic rock, or any genre, in the form of Shine On You Crazy Diamond. The only thing that subtracts from it is the fact (and by "the fact" I mean "my dumb opinion") that parts 8 and 9 seem real unfocused and low on ideas compared to the rest of the thing.

Shine On is a behemoth and it dominates the majority of the album. But the other three songs all stand up; I'd categorize them all as classics. Really, with that in mind, it's no surprise how many people say this is their best. They're highly distinct from each other: Welcome to the Machine is cold, industrial progressive rock, albeit with acoustic guitars, Have a Cigar is futuristic electric Blues-rock, and Wish You Were Here is like an English stoner's version of the Country & Western genre. While the songs are thematically connected, the extreme musical differences between all of them, gives Wish You Were Here a disconnected patchwork quality. The contrast between, say, Have a Cigar and the title track, for example, are so jarring that it sounds like two different bands. I suppose this is appropriate for a band that's said to have been struggling with its own identity by the mid 70's. This apparent disconnectedness works to the album's advantage, making it seem a bit like a nonlinear, surrealist TV or radio drama.

Lyrically, you're dealing with a seriously haunted record. It's Roger Waters trademark mixture of human compassion and mechanized cynicism at its most focused. The guy's heart is clearly being pulled in at least two or three directions, and it's messing with the essence of his very soul. If the album could speak it'd say something a bit like this: "Look what they've done to us. Look what they did to Syd Barrett. Look what we did to ourselves. Look what we did to Syd Barrett. Get us out of here, we just want to be a band again."

Anyway, right, the bonus material. The coolest cuts on the bonus disc are Raving & Drooling and You've Gotta Be Crazy. They're not quite "lost" songs because they turned into Sheep and Dogs, respectively, but they're different enough from those songs to be pretty fascinating. Without the Orwellian stuff that would later be added, the songs fit in well with the themes of Wish You Were Here. You've Gotta Be Crazy is about sacrificing your sanity to get ahead, to be a "success". Once again there's that underlying, unspoken message: "For God's sake, get us out of here." Raving & Drooling, meanwhile, is brutal-sounding song about the violence of human nature, and the act of "pretending the rest are not real". Without the comical "Sheep" metaphor it's quite disturbing for mid-70's Pink Floyd, a sort of sonic portrait of a full-on psychopath. In addition to those two there's a version of Have a Cigar with Roger's originally vocals on it, the ones he was unsatisfied with and replaced with Roy Harper. I like it better than the version that made the cut. The alternate take of the title track, with the violins, and the live version of Shine On, performed in its entirety, are also great. The two-minute 'wine-glasses' instrumental is kind of underwhelming; it just sounds like the first movement of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, standing on its own.