The Madcap Laughs and Barrett

Being the great Pink Floyd fan that I am, I’ve made it my mission to listen to every one of their albums. Beginning in the late 60s, they began producing their first few albums. At the time, singer-songwriter and guitarist Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett led Floyd. He wrote and co-wrote many of the bands early songs. The early work of Floyd had heavy psychedelic undertones owing to Barrett’s almost constant use of LSD and other drugs.
The early Floyd albums are hit and miss; songs on the albums are sometimes beautifully written while others are poorly produced with a clumsy, even unprofessional, sound.
Even with these inconsistencies, I wanted to give Barrett’s two solo albums a try. The Madcap Laughs and Barrett were released around the same time Floyd, with new guitarist and former best friend of Barrett, David Gilmour, was in the production stage of Dark Side of The Moon.
These two albums have much in common with those produced by Floyd during the Barrett-led era. Not only is the songwriting similar, but the instrumentation is also almost the same because former band mates of Barrett’s collaborated with him on the album (Rick Wright, David Gilmour, and Nick Masson, all of Pink Floyd).
TML and Barrett are similarly inconsistent on a song-to-song basis: some are smoothly made with interesting guitar parts and lyrics while others seem to have the same chord progressions. Often it was difficult to tell one song from another owing to the unnoticeable differences between some songs.
For someone who enjoyed Barrett’s early work with Pink Floyd (i.e. A Saucerful of Secrets), I was, for the most part, disappointed by his two solo albums. It is said that his mental condition had declined severely at this point which may have played a role in the quality of his music. However, with that in mind, I still only found 2 or 3 songs on each album that I find musically moving.
Perhaps the reason for my dislike of the album is the fact that I do not, unlike Barrett, habitually abuse LSD. But I don’t think music should only be enjoyable when using hallucinogenic drugs.