Little by little the night turns around

Pink Floyd - A Saucerful of Secrets - 1968

Between late 1967 and early 1968, Syd Barrett's behaviour was causing a lot of trouble for Pink Floyd: He would stare blankly in interviews, forget to play his parts in gigs, there's even a story about him starting to detune his guitar in the middle of a gig.
Pink Floyd got David Gilmour to fill in for Barrett, at first with the idea of simply replacing him as a touring musician. But already by January '68, they realised that arrangement was not going to work either: Barrett seemed completely indifferent to anything the band was doing, and wasn't even participating in writing songs. And that's how Gilmour became a full time member of the band.
Now, all this happened while they were actually recording their second album. Barrett had written most of the songs for their first album, and the band struggled for a while to come up with material for this album.
When this one was released, it was met with quite harsh criticism. I do love this album, though, and I think that while Barrett was a creative genius, the shift that slowly starts becoming apparent here is what would eventually make Pink Floyd one of the greatest bands that ever existed. While it still shows a lot of elements of their psychedelic origins, they were already signs of the direction they were moving towards, especially for the next 4 or 5 years. There's much more participation from Rick Wright, both on keyboards as in composition, as well as an increase in the complexity of some of the songs.
All in all, I think this is a great album, and perhaps one of the most underrated albums by Pink Floyd. And considering what the band was going through, this was a brilliant effort.

• "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" is one of my favourite songs. I love the near hypnotic rhythm it has. It is also the only Pink Floyd song that has all 5 of them playing in it. 
• The title track is actually a 4 part instrumental composition, allegedly representing a battle and the aftermath. The final part "Celestial Voices" is beautiful, and it's, perhaps, the closest that this album gets to the future sound of Pink Floyd.
• In the recording sheet, "See-Saw" is listed as "The Most Boring Song I've Ever Heard Bar Two". It's probably not the most exciting song ever written, but it does have a certain idyllic quality that I do like a lot. Another idyllic and nostalgic tune here is "Remember a Day", also written by Wright.
• I can't remember if it's been really long since I heard this album in full, or if I had just never realised, but when I heard the beginning of "Let there be more Light", the opening track, I couldn't help but notice it sounded a lot like some other song. It eventually dawned on me, that it's "Taste in Men", a 2000 song by Placebo.
• The final track of the album is "Jugband Blues", the only song written and sung by Barrett here. The lyrics start by saying: "It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here / And I'm most obliged to you for making it clear / That I'm not here". It does feel like a cynical comment of his situation at the time, although some interpretations point to the fact that, by then, Syd wasn't just feeling isolated from the band, but from the whole world. 

Bonus tracks

• Just in case anybody wants to check, here's "Let there be more Light", and Placebo's "Taste in Men", so you can see that they pretty much start exactly the same. 

La soledad es un amigo que no está

Didn't listen to any other albums today, but was listening to some old singles by Argentinean band Almendra, which were released in 1968. They were released with their first album, which I will write about soon enough, and it doesn't make much sense to just post about 2 singles, but this is a song I love, and one that has a strange and touching story: Luis Alberto Spinetta, very young at the time, received word that a friend from high school had passed away and wrote the song for him. The lyrics, part of which are the title of this section say "Loneliness is a friend who's no longer here / It is his words that will never reach you anyway". Later on, Spinetta found out that his friend was actually alive, and they remained friends for years. Just want to leave the song here, in its live version, which I like a lot. It's that kind of day.