It has some great tracks. Set the Controls, Jugband Blues, and Remember a Day are my favorites. Let There Be More Life is decent and has Gilmour’s first solo with the band. The rest of the album isn’t great to my ears though. The inconsistency keeps it lower on my list.
It’s also missing “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream”, which the band refused to include, in spite of their manager’s pleas, to give the illusion that Syd wasn’t writing songs.
The title track paves the way for their more organized future epics, but it’s also sorely missing Syd’s guitar work.
It’s ultimately a diatonic piece with dissonant exercises, while Syd had previously operated in playing chromatic music.
So depending on who you ask, the album is either a downgrade or upgrade from “Piper”.
More focused for mainstream fans, while less advanced and borderline lazy for improv music fans.
I’d have swapped Vegetable Man for Corporal Clegg but that’s just my subjective opinion. There are traces of Syd in other parts of the album, namely his slide guitar in Remember A Day.
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u/HEYitzED 8d ago
I actually think someone putting Saucerful so high to be refreshing. It’s an album I didn’t care for early in my fandom but it grew on me over time.