Review Summary: Oh hey, that's a pretty weird sound. I like the animal noises in the background, too. But where are they going with this?
Through the duration of our everyday lives, whether we’re stuck in the middle of a bustling and overcrowded city, or stranded in the middle of a barren and unforgiving desert, there’s always things going on in the background. No matter what kind of situation you’re in, there’s always things above you, below you, and things swerving from side to side, things that create the scenery and atmosphere surrounding you. Of course, all of these surrounding things, and the sounds they create, tend not to get very much attention paid to them by the person in the foreground of the situation being focused on. If the person’s stuck in an overcrowded city crawling with red lights and giddy tourists, they’re probably focusing on figuring out how to get the hell out of there. And if they’re stranded in the middle of a desert, they’re most likely focusing on figuring out how to get back to civilization. Because of the circumstances surrounding these situations, the intriguing and possibly beautiful background noises that that accompany them are rarely heard.
But there is one way, or at least, the most notable and significant way, that these background noises get themselves noticed: by artists who create ambient music, music that fits the fingers of background shadows like a glove. But just because the music carries itself out hidden in the shadows does not at all mean that it’s directionless and not worth listening to; even ambient sounds not created by musicians for the purpose of having people listen to them can still have direction. If the music is good, people will listen to it, even if just to accompany their thoughts. If the sounds are intriguing enough, people will take a step back from the foreground, close their eyes, and bask in the ambience. Pink Floyd’s
Ummagumma is a perfect example of the droning, dull, and directionless din that someone would ignore (or perhaps not even notice) and go back to finding a way out of the desert.
Oh yes, there’s a wide variety of instruments used. Oh yes, there’s lots of experimentation in terms of song and album structure. And oh yes, 10 out of the 12 tracks are instrumentals. But
why? Nothing the album does ever seems to be for a reason. It never seems to have any ideas it wants to express, or messages it wants to make an argument for, which would be fine if the music sounded intriguing. But more often than not, it doesn’t. The atmospheres are dull and most of the time pretty unpleasant. And there’s no epic crescendos or build-ups, no soaring climaxes or memorable melodies, all of the dense sounds just lifelessly drone on and on.
This unfortunate aesthetic is encapsulated perfectly in the four-track-long opening composition “Sysyphus.” The first part is the ambient introduction, consisting of bleak-sounding horns backed up by big, booming drums. It sounds vaguely intriguing, but the created tone and atmosphere is just
so bleak, that not only does it not make the listener excited for the rest of the album, it also ends up providing a boring and surprisingly unpleasant listening experience by itself. The second part of “Sysyphus” is three and a half minutes of structureless piano noodling, completely void of anything that catches the listener’s attention. Then, in part 3, we have some odd percussion wankery in front of a backdrop of animal noises. And then, the fourth and final part, goes out not with a bang, but with yet another halfhearted collection of sprawled-out sounds, that seem to just be hanging around with no rhyme or reason.
Luckily, the album gets a little bit of a lift with the song following “Sysyphus,” “Grantchester Meadows,” one of the two tracks with vocals. It’s a very timid, acoustic number, and it’s the first song on the album that has some sort of structure. (With these ‘structure’ complaints, I’m not saying that any song without structure is automatically ‘bad,’ or vice versa, I’m just saying that with music like this, a little structure helps the listener know what the hell is going on). But even though it has structure, the directions it takes still seem a bit skewed. A very quiet and not very interesting acoustic solo is played after the song’s second chorus, and the solo goes on for so long that it makes the listener think the song is coming to a close. But then, both the second verse and chorus are repeated afterward, and after that the song
still takes a little over a minute to end. Not for any legitimate reason, like repeating a pivotal riff or anything like that, it just strolls on by for the mere sake of it. The song’s lyrics are admittedly pretty good, packed with lots of pretty imagery, but they’re sung so lifelessly that there’s no way the images will appear in my head. All I hear is words. Which I guess is suitable for the music the words are in front of, but it still just reinforces how boring the song is, and how much it could be improved.
The next song is the hilariously titled “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave and Grooving With A Pict.” And due to the prevalence of it in this song, I think it’s a great representation of the other large fault I find with
Ummagumma, this fault being that the album relies too much on its bizarre experimentation. I think it may be that this experimentation is exactly why the band thought all these colorless soundscapes would sound fine without sufficient songwriting elements. Every use of an uncommon instrument, every strange vocal sample, and every bleak atmosphere created by some droning synth or something along those lines, just seems to say “hey, look at how unique I am,” rather than “hey, look how creatively I effectively express the ideas of this song.” And like I’ve said before, sometimes the sounds are intriguing, but most of the time they’re just average and boring, with just enough lifelessness and unsettling oddities to actually cross the “unpleasant” line.
Pink Floyd’s
Ummagumma is sometimes appealing, but more often displeasing. It hardly ever seems like it has any real, concrete ideas it wants to express, and its songs seem to morph from sound to sound, volume to volume and back again, with no real rhyme or reason governing them. And sometimes, the sounds are so strange and without any trace of familiarity or hospitality to the listener, they’re just downright not fun to listen to.
Ummagumma is exactly the kind of ambience that one would want to stay in the background.
