The Piper at the Gates of Dawn Review

Two records fight each other here and both win. One is a set of short, sharp, wilfully childish songs about gnomes, cats, scarecrows and bicycles, sung in a flat English accent that refuses to imitate anyone American. The other is Interstellar Overdrive, nine minutes of a four note riff dissolving into feedback and panning, which is what the band actually did on stage every night. Astronomy Domine opens with Morse code and a chord sequence that keeps sliding sideways.

Lucifer Sam is a spy theme with a cat in it. Bike ends in a room of clockwork and laughter that still unsettles people. What holds it together is Barrett's ear for a phrase, both musical and verbal, and the Farfisa organ, which does most of the actual harmonic work. It is not a comfortable listen and the whimsy has aged unevenly, but nothing else from that summer sounds like it, and the band spent the next decade building enormous structures on foundations they laid here in a few weeks and then largely abandoned.