Meddle Review

The method was to book studio time with nothing written and record fragments, numbered and filed, until something cohered. What cohered is Echoes, which takes a piano note fed through a rotating speaker and grows a whole side out of it: a two part vocal, a funk section, a passage of gull noise made by a wah pedal wired backwards, and a return to the opening theme that lands like a door closing.

It never feels like twenty three minutes. Around it, One of These Days is an instrumental built on two bass lines slightly out of phase with a single spoken threat in the middle, and it is genuinely frightening. A Pillow of Winds and Fearless are quiet, warm, acoustic and much better than their reputation, and Fearless ends with a football crowd singing from a terrace. Seamus, a blues with a dog howling on it, is a mistake. That is the only mistake. This is the hinge on which everything after it turns.