Ummagumma Music Cd

Pink - Ummagumma

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Ummagumma      Artist : Pink Floyd      List Price : $23.98 USD        Your Price : $16.97 USD      ProductGroup: Music      Release Date : 1990-10-25      Studio : Capitol      Label : Capitol      Avg. Customer Rating : (186 reviews)

Reviews Customer Reviews for Ummagumma      A Classic album from Pink Floyd from before they became so well known      Rating:      This is a CLASSIC album from Pink Floyd. I've loved it since it's release. Not only do you have live tracks of songs from their earliest albums (A Saucerful of Secrets, Astronomy Domine, etc.), but you have a suite of pieces each from Richard Wright (Sysyphus, Parts 1-4), David Gilmour (The Narrow Way, Parts 1-3), and Nick Mason (The Grand Vizier's Garden Party, Parts 1,2, & 3). ...Ans don't miss Roger Waters' 2 pieces: Grantchester Meadows and the inimitable (not that any have tried, to my knowledge) Several Species of Small Furry Aninals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict! This album covers Floyd's gamut up to the time of its release (1969) and presages their future from that vantage point. A MUST purchase for anyone wanting to know Pink Floyd from all sides.     Customer Reviews for Ummagumma Cd      should have been more popular because it's good      Rating:      The studio album of Ummagumma is VERY underappreciated. The "Sysyphus" suite is quite ununual the way it begins with a rather dark and intimidating riff that leads into an Emerson, Lake and Palmer piano melody. It's a peaceful and beautiful melody, that stays consistently good for the most part, until it reaches a point where two notes keep rambling back and forth, then the piano playing gets all messy for a minute or so. Not as good as the stuff ELP would do a few years later, but decent enough. The third part features WEIRD monkey sound effects with jungle-like sounds, and the fourth and final part is absolutely AWESOME because it has an eerie mellotron melody with soft sprinkles of keyboards building slowly, and cautiously, into a loud and intense theme until eventually going back to the intimidating riff that started the whole thing. The fourth part of this suite is really really good though, especially the eerie few minutes that begins the thing, which would work extremely well in a horror film. "Grantchester Meadows" features nice acoustic guitar (I think?) and closely resembles "Wish You Were Here" in the vocals. I wasn't expecting to hear such a mature song on this album going by all the other reviews. "Several Small Species" is a MAJOR head trip, that's for sure! It's totally unique and needs to be appreciated on that level to fully understand. "The Narrow Way" is the highlight of the album for me. Part One has EXCELLENT acoustic guitar, melodic and emotionally touching, and the second part features a Black Sabbath-like guitar riff for a few minutes, before the final part comes in, which sounds like something that would fit in PERFECTLY with the Dark Side of the Moon album. I don't understand people who say Meddle shows signs of what Pink Floyd would sound like later, when this song obviously shows what the band would become just a few years later. "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party" is the only weak point- radical drumming that doesn't go anywhere, and goes on too long. The rest of the album though, is quite fantastic. I don't get the negative reviews for this one I'm afraid. The live album of Ummagumma (which by the way, sounds like a tasty kind of Halloween snack!) isn't NEARLY as good as people have been telling me. What IS really great however, is the opening song "Astronomy Domine", which has an AWESOME space rock jam in the middle that sounds like it probably influenced several bands such as Hawkwind. The jam just feels so natural, like the vocals needed that jam all along in order to complete a perfect song. "Careful with that Axe Eugene" is another great song. The slow keyboard melody in the beginning that builds into these soothing vocals that sail and soar to new heights... Pink Floyd was really good at this. The song gets noisy after a while, but in an appealing kind of way, where you don't want it to stop. Great song. Then the album loses steam super fast. "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" was better on Saucerful of Secrets, because it had a Moody Blues-like vibe flowing through it. Here, the song tries to be something more, and just ends up being a boring song. This version of "Saucerful of Secrets" is overrated BIG time. Everyone says it's better than the version from the studio album of the same name, but it's not. The studio version had these rather unique sound effects, muddy production, and a spooky atmosphere to help make it one of the creepiest songs ever. This version is just loud, and repeats the same notes for several minutes. Not good to me. Yes, I know the studio version repeats a lot too, but that version had sound effects that seemed to add more atmosphere to the song, so it was easy to avoid the parts that repeated a lot. Still, the album gets 5 stars for the studio stuff, which rules. Editorial Reviews for Ummagumma Audio Cd      Amazon.com      Released in 1969, Ummagumma represents where the influence of departed founding songwriter Syd Barrett began to fade in favor of the rather less whimsical and pastoral visions of Roger Waters. Ummagumma is a double album, divided into live and studio halves. The live cuts--"Astronomy Domine," "Careful with That Axe, Eugene," "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," and "A Saucerful of Secrets"--established the Floyd's predilection for gloomily atmospheric and faintly preposterous sci-fi bombast that would turn them into such a successful stage act. The kindest that may be said of the studio compositions--by and large interminable avant-prog rambles in search of the lost chord--is that they haven't dated terribly well. --Andrew Mueller