My brother, my girlfriend and I were talking about bands like Pink Floyd (which are few) who don't rely on a lot of movement and release for themselves while they play but are more along the lines of a deep "sensory experience" (to quote my brother), bands like Tool and Porcupine Tree, for example.
It's obvious that without The Pink Floyd, neither of these bands ever would have become what they are. And The Pink Floyd were definitely a band that was all about having every note right, every hit precise; and working with the visual stimuli, they didn't need to be "in your face", because they were already inside your mind.
Dark Side of the Moon has been a reliable standby ever since I was 12 or 13 years old. It's a perfect album. One of the few that if it had anything added or taken away, it would be detrimental to it's sound.
Animals, my second favorite, I didn't discover until I was about 17 or 18, and it took a while to grow on me. But now that I've really listened to it, I feel that it too is an album that is perfect in it's solidarity. I prefer it sometimes to Dark Side...
Although I discovered Meddle before Animals, and I did prefer it for a while, I've grown accustomed to it's sound, and it is a great album with excellent songs. I feel the same way about A Saucerful of Secrets, which I feel is probably one of their darkest and heaviest albums ever, perhaps because it was the last to be recorded with Syd Barret, if my knowledge serves me correctly.
The later Pink Floyd stuff from albums like The Wall and Wish You Were Here just don't hold the same fire for me as their earlier works. But songs like "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", "Mother" and "Comfortably Numb" are very intense pieces.
Pink Floyd is an untouchable band, in my opinion, because they were the first to produce that kind of sound, which was deep and subtly beautiful and sometimes transcendent, but also had a fairly common thread of being sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, and even mocking in it's views on society and politics.
They kind of took some of the same fire that the Beatles carried, but gave it a more crass edge. For example, their first hit song, "Arnold Layne" was about a man who goes to department stores to try on and steal women's underwear. And this was 1967. And while the Beatles were peetering out and still writing ballads and love songs (although along with their own metamorphic, transcendental pieces), The Floyd kept exploring deeper into that chasm which separated them from their contemporaries.
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