The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Wow, Pink Floyd 2 days in a row and while I am much bigger fan of 70s proggy albums, this is great psychedelia, super influentials and probably 4 stars from me.

Syd's two solo records have a firmer place in my heart but this is still pretty great for its sense of adventure and invention. It's a shame they went so po-faced after Syd.

Great for the time and very experimental, but pales in comparison to later Floyd releases.

4.0/5.0: Great

not the best pink floyd album by a long shot but its good

3/5. I personally just vastly prefer prog Pink Floyd to psych Pink Floyd. that being said, Piper is still a fascinating album sound wise. A lot of 60’s psych is super bland but Syd Barrett as a frontman feels like he was built for this style and he gives it the flavor and texture that it often lacks. However in terms of the swings the album takes, it does have a few misses, I’m not the biggest fan of tracks like “gnome” or “Pow R. Toc H.” But when it works, it is very engrossing.

Okay, if Pink Floyd were to be covered across a few records in the 1001 Albums books, it makes sense to include one from the Syd Barrett era of the band. For those not aware, Pink Floyd was more psychedelic rock than progressive rock in the beginning and was fronted by established singer-songwriter Syd Barrett. Of course, the other notable aspect of the band's early days was that Syd partook in a lot of LSD, and that drug is very much reflected in the writing for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

This is a very trippy record, with a lot of twisting compositions, dissonant keyboard playing from Richard Wright, and heavy use of echo and reverb. It's weird because I can hear remnants of the sound that the band would transition to through the likes of the space rock voyage of "Astronomy Domine", the storytelling in the yearning for childhood on "Matilda Mother," and the sprawling, nine-minute instrumental improvisation of "Interstellar Overdrive." Yet at the same time, there's also some bizarre novelty tracks with very simple, whimsical topics like Syd talking about one of his Siamese cats, "Lucifer Sam", or the plodding tall tales about gnomes and scarecrows that have this ear-grating click-clacking percussion, or even Syd's admittedly cringeworthy attempts to pick up a girl on "Bike". I can't even say that Syd owned all the weird shit in the lyrical writing, as Roger Waters proved to be just as kooky on the rambling "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk".

It does seem that the band went for broke with all their experimenting, which is why there is such a wide range of tone throughout this album. That said, not every experiment landed well for me personally. I also can't help but feel that I've heard better, not just with respect to Pink Floyd's catalog, but even for psychedelic and experimental rock in 1967. The Velvet Underground & Nico's debut, The Doors' debut, The Electric Prunes' debut, Disraeli Gears from Cream, Safe as Milk from Captain Beefheart, and both Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love from the Jimi Hendrix Experience were all structurally better than this. Hell, this album was recorded at Abbey Road Studios at the same time as the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's, and while both albums can be considered influential in psychedelic music, I would argue Sgt. Pepper's made the bigger splash, with more consistent quality track by track.

At the end of the day, this may not be close to what I consider the best that Pink Floyd had to offer. But I can recognize and appreciate the importance The Piper at the Gates of Dawn had on psychedelic rock music, and just how unique Syd Barrett was as a songwriter. At the very least, there are some good tracks found in this LSD trip of a record that I can cherry-pick from.

I thought this was better than expected.

This is #day662 of my #1001albumsyoumusthearbeforeyoudie challenge, and… everything has to start somewhere, and this is where it all begins for the Floyd. It's fun to imagine this is the same band that, in just over 5 years, would release that crazy run of records: The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall. As for the debut, though, this is, without a doubt, a psychedelic rock album, psychedelic to an almost acidic degree. "Astronomy Domine" and especially "Interstellar Overdrive" are essential Floyd numbers. This is a 4 out of 5. Looking forward to #day663.

The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is definitely one of the trippiest albums i have ever heard. This is the only Pink Floyd album that Syd Barrett and after listening to his solo album, it shows. Nearly every song here had at least one weird aspect to them. If you look past all the weirdness though, you can definitely see the building blocks that made Pink Floyd into what they are today but with this album, you can still tell that this is their first effort and they still were trying to figure out what kind of band they wanted to be so they just ended up throwing whatever they could at the wall and seeing what would stick. Its not a bad album but Pink Floyd would go on to do much better.
Best Song: Lucifer Sam
Worst Song: Interstellar Overdrive
Side note: All Pink Floyd albums are done, you know what that means:
1. The Dark Side Of The Moon
2. Wish You Were Here
3. The Wall
4. The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

The music is like the piper heralding a spacey, quirky age.

no dsotm or wish you were here but still good

I think Pink Floyd can regard themselves as very fortunate that their record company didn't drop them after this first effort, or we might never have heard of them.

Even by the standards of other "psychedelic" albums of the period this is absolute shite.

When some one says 'Pink Floyd' I would imagine that there are very few, if any, people who first think of this record. It's so different to what the band became when Syd Barrett left. And they got so much better after this record. I know that this is the first Pink Floyd album and the first album is rarely the best or even representative of what a longstanding band becomes, but this one is really different. It has some interesting things going on but it isn't really anything the write home about. There were a lot of psychedelia records that sounded like this. Once Syd Barrett left, Pink Floyd really developed into a better and much more unique band. This album is interesting to listen to mostly because of how the band changed so much afterwards. 2.75/7

It was aright, I liked the weird ones most.

Pink Floyd's music is complete arse. There I said it

1 ⭐️

Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is really fascinating due to it's unique dual identity. Piper is (one of) the first manifestation(s) of Pink Floyd, with which you can enjoy a game of connect the dots that leads the concepts here to the more familiar Floyd of the '70s. But Piper is also the most complete and coherent artistic statement from Syd Barrett, who wrote 8 of these songs, and contributed to two more. You can most clearly hear the Pink Floyd of the '70s on Interstellar Overdrive, a spacey, expansive jam. But the fingerprints are all over the place hear. There are licks and backing vocals here and there where the connections certainly come together. And that ultimately makes this album really interesting when these early Floyd-isms butt up against Syd Barrett's songs and vocal stylings. His songwriting is bright, surreal, and *extremely* psychedelic. This is another inductee into the extremely short list of psych albums that I think genuinely make you feel like you're on something. But theses writing styles collide with the spacey-ness of the band and result in a pretty dark, bizarre example of psych pop. On The Gnome, Barrett's ultra-enunciated delivery almost makes him sound angry. Chapter 24 is the collision of psychedelic swirling and truly bewildering lyrics, where everything you're hearing seems to make sense as you hear it, but it doesn't feel like the song conveys any information. It's genuinely disorienting. Matilda Mother is fantastical and lushly blissed out. And Bike has these explosions between verses which then "slide" down, also *very* disorienting. Astronomy Domine is one of the most lasting moments from this album. And Lucifer Sam is also very enjoyable. It's also worth noting that Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk is Roger Waters' only songwriting contribution here, and it's actually very good. Honestly everything here is pretty enjoyable, even Pow R Toc H, which does, admittedly, kind of push it. This stands up both as an origin story for Pink Floyd, and a psychedelic artistic statement from the unique and deeply sad figure that Syd Barrett was. This is one of the most fascinating psych albums on the list, and while it isn't perfect, it is trippy, creative, and very fun to listen to.

Pink Floyd without David Gilmour, playing beat music—that sounds nice enough, but not exactly amazing.
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” basically lives up to that expectation. You have to imagine The Beatles during their drug-fueled phases, but with even more LSD—and, of course, more virtuosic instrumental skills. The first two songs, “Astronomy Domine” and “Lucifer Sam,” are still quite nice; the only single, “Flaming,” already sounds like a parody, and after that, the material becomes difficult to follow at times.
As a glimpse into the British music scene in the late ’60s, this is highly interesting. As an album on its own, I’d classify it more as “nice to know” than “must have.”

Most I've enjoyed a PF album. Still not for me though.

Sorry guys but if you're going to be experimental can you bother making it sound good?

Yeah if this were any other band I'm not sure it would be on this list, alongside a lot of the rest of the borderline offensive psych-adjacent late 60s British pop. Why am I listening to Pink Floyd sing about a gnome named Grimble Gromble?
I do like Pink Floyd a LOT - I think that's why I'm being so harsh. One star.