Pink Floyd - Atom Heart Mother

Released - October 1970

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - Pink Floyd & Norman Smith

Selected Personnel - Roger Waters (Bass/Guitar/Vocals/Tape Effects); David Gilmour (Guitar/Bass/Drums/Vocals); Richard Wright (Keyboards/Vocals); Nick Mason (Drums/Percussion)

Standout Track - Atom Heart Mother Suite

By the time I came to Atom Heart Mother, I was already a huge Floyd fan but was beginning to question just how far that affection ran. I loved their run of classic albums in the 70s from The Dark Side Of The Moon through to The Wall, and had decided to delve back into their early work, and was generally uninspired by what I found. More eventually wormed its way into my affections, but much of their other early work I found self-indulgent and tedious. The immediate follow-up to More ranks as the worst thing they ever created, and, for my money, one of the most tediously boring albums ever recorded by any artist. Ummagumma's first half is a live recording of some of their better early psychedelic jams and is fairly enjoyable, but the second half is a place where each of the individual band members showcase their own songwriting talents, ranging from the tedious keyboard cacophonies of Richard Wright's "Sysyphus" through five minutes of Roger Waters impersonating a rat and a Scotsman in "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict," then via the tuneless guitar noodling of David Gilmour's "The Narrow Way" and culminating in the interminable percussion solo of Nick Mason's "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party." There are few albums I hate more, although its only saving grace is Waters's gorgeous acoustic ballad "Grantchester Meadows." Desperate to work out just when Pink Floyd became genuinely good, I ploughed on and was immediately rewarded with my answer - on Atom Heart Mother, something has changed significantly. The ambition and intelligence and sense of craft is still there, but in the place of the self-indulgence and the tedious jamming is an innate sense of musicality and musical daring that they hadn't yet showcased.

The album stems around the epic title track, one of the most singular things the band ever recorded, and at the time, a piece of music totally unlike anything else that had ever been committed to record. After recording the soundtrack to the film Zabriskie Point, the band had a number of leftover instrumental pieces that they had no clear intention for, and attempted to weave them into one continuous suite. Still feeling it lacked something, they drafted in composer and arranger Ron Geesin and gave him the unenviable task of composing a full orchestral accompaniment to the suite, and the end result is one of the most daring, exciting and unusual things in rock music. Orchestral accompaniment had been used to ornament rock music in the past (Yes would do the same thing the same year with their second album, Time And A Word), but Floyd made the bold decision to create a piece of music that was driven by, and focused on, the orchestral parts, with the band themselves largely relegated to the role of backing musicians except for select sections. The suite opens in an avalanche of bombast with its bold brass fanfares before eventually settling down into a slower groove much later that showcases Richard Wright's jazzy keyboards and, more significantly, the elegant cries of David Gilmour's guitar. In that section, Gilmour lays down his first truly essential, mind-blowing Floyd guitar solo, and perhaps finally acquits himself for the first time as a true force to be reckoned with. From that section there's a fine bit of nonsense singing from a full choir then a bit of typical prog-rock aimless meandering (which, after all the good this piece has done in the build-up, feels earned for the first time ever) before crashing back into the brass fanfares of the opening theme. It's a breathtaking piece of music, astonishing in its ambition and grandeur but actually manages to summon up enough chutzpah to get away with such an overblown statement.

The second side of the album is a much more traditional affair, save for the pointless final track. Sadly, as accomplished as Nick Mason is as a drummer, most opportunities he was ever given to compose something himself end up being sadly disappointing, generally just being lengthy soundscapes and collages of sound effects and percussive noises, which fails to really engage musically to any extent. The whole band is credited with the writing of the tedious "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast," but it was largely a Mason showcase that basically finishes this great album off with a frustrating whimper. But before that the band repeat their approach from Ummagumma, allowing each of the principal songwriters to deliver one song, and the songwriting quality has come on in leaps and bounds in the year since that album. The three songs here can't help but feel like a bit of a letdown after the grandiose excitement of the "Atom Heart Mother Suite," but they demonstrate a kind of summery, laid-back psychedelic cool that makes for excellent easy listening on a sunny day. Roger Waters's "If" is a simple acoustic affair, in the vein of "Grantchester Meadows" but actually lacking some of that song's lazy, sun-drenched atmosphere, though it does begin to showcase Waters's obsession with madness that would come to dominate his writing for the next decade ("If I go insane, please don't put your wires in my brain"). Richard Wright's "Summer '68" is the most exciting of the three, with its bold brass fanfares making it stand apart from the other two more laid-back pieces, though it fails to be as melodically compelling. And David Gilmour's "Fat Old Sun" treads similar ground to "If," but ornaments it with further guitar tricks and a more rousing finale, and rounds things off with a sunny laziness reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" or the Beatles' "Sun King."

Although those three songs on side two are far from being Floyd classics, Atom Heart Mother is the first Floyd album which ("Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" aside) shows a band really firing on all cylinders and delivering something truly essential. The suite is still one of the coolest and most innovative prog epics of all time, and the optimistic, sun-kissed atmosphere that laces this whole album is so infectiously joyous that one can forgive that final misstep. From here, Pink Floyd wouldn't put a foot wrong for the rest of their careers - some of their albums were better than others, but in my opinion, from Atom Heart Mother onwards every single studio album they released was an essential piece of music history, and their very best was still yet to come.

Track Listing:

1. Atom Heart Mother Suite (Roger Waters; David Gilmour; Richard Wright; Nick Mason & Ron Geesin)

2. If (Roger Waters)

3. Summer '68 (Richard Wright)

4. Fat Old Sun (David Gilmour)

5. Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast (Roger Waters; David Gilmour; Richard Wright & Nick Mason)