If your first experience with Pink Floyd was through their 70s progressive rock run, there is a high possibility that you will not initially like this album. Obviously the core members, minus Gilmore, are here, but the Syd Barrett led Floyd was essentially a completely different band. Weird, psychedelic and arguably genre-defining are three words that could be used to describe The Piper At the Gates of Dawn.
The amount of psychedelic rock and pop albums influenced by the Floyd’s seminal debut are too much to count. Syd and the band managed to capture all of the greatest things about british psychedelia in one 11 track album. There is the songwriting, which is extremely catchy, quite odd and borderline childish at times. The Floyd crafted songs full of british whimsy with very dark undercurrents, two elements that Syd probably mixed better than the majority of the other songwriters in the psychedelia scene at the time.
Songs like "Bike" and "Flaming" seem, no, are quite childish lyrically, yet at the same time there seems to be a sinister, nightmare-like element that creeps into the songs. Examples of this being the creepy instrumental passage at the end of "Bike" and the menacing organ playing at the beginning of "Flaming". "Pow R. Toc H." is another haunting stand-out song. The track is an instrumental that starts off with what one could only describe as the band beat boxing, with a few nice, happy enough sounding, piano lines from Richard Wright, only to suddenly twist itself into a dark and distorted guitar and organ dominated soundscape.
There is also, of course, the occasional guitar freak outs scattered throughout this album. The most notable being the space-rock journey that is "Interstellar Overdrive", which despite maybe being a little too drawn out for some listeners, is really a treat when one is in the mood for some, extensive and adventurous psychedelia. For listeners that are more interested in the more psych-rock side of the Floyd, the tracks after “Interstellar Overdrive” might be a bit of a disappointment, but the variety adds to the overall strength of the LP. Be it absolute madness ("Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk") or an extremely catchy pop song ("The Gnome"), this album, despite the fact that it isn't that long, manages to almost cover everything in-between.
The album starts off amazingly - "Astronomy Dominé", "Lucifer Sam" and "Matilda Mother" are probably among the three strongest opening tracks on any rock album. How Syd and Roger occasionally sing together throughout the “Matilda Mother”, how the organ is used throughout and most of all how the track grows more intense as it goes on, culminating with some great guitar riffs being played during the last verse, making the song one of the best of the album. By the end of The Piper of The Gates of Dawn, the listener has been exposed to an almost indescribable, Alice in Wonderland worthy trip that every fan of psychedelic rock needs to go on.
