Floydhead: The Floydian Propulsion Project: The Artistic Electronica of Pink Floyd (3rd Edition)

Floydhead
The Floydian Propulsion Project: the Artistic Electronica of Pink Floyd (3rd Edition)
3rd Edition

As a know-it-all rock critic, it’s easy to forget that I did not always possess my monumental cache of useless music information. For instance, when I was a lad going bonkers for Led Zeppelin, I would buy up every album I could find with even the loosest Zep association. This practice led to me acquiring Coded: The Limited Edition Trance Remixes. At that tender age, I had little idea what the words “trance” or “remix” meant, but I knew what “limited edition” meant (and, sadly, believed in its connotations) and knew that that phrase, when attached to “Led Zeppelin”, formed an invisible crowbar that pried open my wallet to dish out the then-outrageous sum of $22 for what I would soon realize was just a boring cut-and-paste job by some hack with a Mac.

Ah, to be so young! Today, thanks to scars like these, I can no longer look at a CD like The Floydian Propulsion Project: The Artistic Electronica of Pink Floyd without issuing a soul-deep sigh of weary contempt. It seems that any band that’s earned a sizeable following will get as a further reward an endless supply of leech-like CDs that exploit the neurotic disorder of completism. Sure, you’ve got every live and studio album that the Eagles ever put out, but do you have a copy of the London Symphony Orchestra playing their greatest hits? No? “I thought you were a real fan,” says the CD, thus shaming another sad little man into buying it.

And now, the inevitable question: Is this Floydhead thing one of those con jobs, or has this all been one big wind-up? The answer: Well, I’m not sure. While everything about this little oddity screams cheap exploitation, the actual meat of it is far more difficult to dismiss. The biggest surprise is how tenuously Propulsion Project is connected to its purported source material. Sure, Floyd samples abound, but this isn’t, like some other remix albums previously mentioned, just loops of the original songs with some phasing and reverb. The bulk of what’s heard here was generated by the enigmatic Floydhead, led by the equally mysterious “Seth”. Most of the beats come from a drum machine, and vocals come almost entirely from radio and TV samples, not from Roger Waters or David Gilmour. In fact, Seth nicks little more than chord progressions (sometimes transported to Floydhead’s synthesizers) and Gilmour’s soaring and wholly fitting lead guitar. Propulsion Project‘s ties even grow so abstract that it spends a track on a Pink Anderson blues song, the man who, along with Floyd “Dipper Boy” Council gave Syd Barrett the idea for a band name.

All of this suggests a group far too into their idols to make anything individualistic from the stuff they worship so much, but if Propulsion Project has a failing, it’s not that. It comes about as close as these things can to being a legitimate work of art, certainly an unusual feat in the field. The album creates a mood that is juxtaposed to the stoned angst of Pink Floyd itself rather than merely trying to clone it. The electronic work-up infuses a sense of irony and playfulness not present in the original material, even if this causes it to suffer some for sounding more distant.

So with all these qualities in its favor, it’s a shame Propulsion Project ultimately can’t find a way to transcend its dubious category. It is, like most similar records, a sprawling and messy affair, seeming to throw together whatever its authors were able to do with little thought given to the coherence of the final project. Floyd samples are taken haphazardly from all points in their long career, and if, say, ordering them chronologically might have sacrificed the admirable independence of Floydhead from Floyd, it could have lent some needed logic to their record. Propulsion Project is, to wit, neither here nor there, a strong but imperfect album of a horrible type that lands anonymously in the giant expanse between brilliance and dreck.