Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd album) still sounds unconvincing in its ponderous sincerity and displays a critical lack of imagination in all departments." However, Robert Christgau wrote in "The Village Voice": "The music is not only simple and attractive, with the synthesizer used mostly for texture and the guitar breaks for comment, but it actually achieves some of the symphonic dignity (and cross-referencing) that "The Dark Side of the Moon" simulated so ponderously." He later wrote: "My favorite Pink Floyd album has always been "Wish You Were Here", and you know why? It has soul, that's why – it's Roger Waters's lament for Syd, not my
Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd album) was sold in an opaque green cellophane sleeve – censoring the cover image – and he copied the idea, concealing the artwork for "Wish You Were Here" in a black-coloured shrink-wrap (therefore making the album art "absent"). The concept behind "Welcome to the Machine" and "Have a Cigar" suggested the use of a handshake (an often empty gesture), and George Hardie designed a sticker containing the album's logo of two mechanical hands engaged in a handshake, to be placed on the opaque sleeve (the mechanical handshake logo would also appear on the labels of the vinyl album this time in