The Early Years: Germin/ation 1968

I don’t think this is as good as the proceeding album which had the plus side of including material a lot of fans already knew, in an accessible place. This one gives us a few more singles, the only one I like being Point Me at the Sky (although Careful With That Axe Eugene isn’t bad, I just vastly prefer the live versions of it) but is mostly new territory. Very little of this new territory is worth listening to. I liked how the capitol studio session starts and some of the sounds are cool, I particularly love the guitar outdo which is so distorted and twisted in the most wonderfully rotten ways. Yet it doesn’t quite click for me. It’s just quite clear on these sort of tracks that Floyd are not jazz musicians and improvisation just isn’t their strong point. As for Roger’s Boogie, the misleading title doesn’t bother me for it being just a pretty cool song. Sounds like nothing else in their catalogue. It doesn’t blow my socks off or anything but it’s in my Floyd playlist if I ever feel I need to listen to it. Could be a bit shorter though but it works.

As for the BBC sessions, I just can’t muster much excitement up for s bunch of badly preserved live recordings from the BBC archives. Most of these do very little for me. I like Embryo though. It’s a nice acoustic song that would expand into much more electrifying renditions later on. I have no idea why this has been shrouded in history for so long.