Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds

Released - June 1972

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - Pink Floyd

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

Standout Track - Obscured By Clouds/When You're In

This is an album that most new Pink Floyd fans won't get around to listening to until after exhausting their more well-known material. Weirdly, it was one of the first I listened to. I certainly experienced it before I experienced the likes of Meddle, Atom Heart Mother or their later stuff like The Final Cut and The Division Bell. I might have even listened to it before I heard Animals, which is generally accepted as being one of their four all-time classic albums. I forget exactly, but certainly I came to Obscured By Clouds far earlier than might be considered usual given its relative obscurity within the Pink Floyd canon. As such, it's come to be an album far closer to my heart than it is for most Floyd fans, and I still hold it up as one of their very best. It shows the band in an interesting state of almost-readiness, being recorded in the midst of their preparations for their seminal, game-changing The Dark Side Of The Moon. The material isn't quite up to the standard of what was to come once they truly announced themselves as one of the all-time great bands the following year, but the atmospherics and mood of the music they assembled for this interim project demonstrate a band on the very cusp of achieving their full potential, having shown steady improvement and flashes of brilliance over the previous few years. In many ways, it's the culmination of what they had slowly been working on over their early albums - there are no lengthy epics or instrumental jams, but the increasing sense of atmospheric innovation has now been condensed into more concise and memorable songs. That one year later they would create perhaps the first prog album to be a huge, popular, radio-friendly hit is perhaps no longer as surprising as that idea might have seemed after Atom Heart Mother - the Pink Floyd of Obscured By Clouds is a band that has honed their approach to music and captured the spirit of progressive rock, poised to take the world by storm.

When Floyd were contacted by the French film director Barbet Schroeder, who had earlier commissioned them to record the soundtrack to his film More in 1969, asking them to work with him again to produce a soundtrack to his new film La Vallee, they were already in the early stages of preparing their magnum opus, having performed it live a few times and started work on recording. Nonetheless, having achieved some great stuff via their earlier work with Schroeder, they agreed to put Dark Side... on a brief hiatus and write some new material for the film. As with More, I've never seen the film that Obscured By Clouds was designed to accompany, but for a film soundtrack, Floyd have certainly managed to make every song have a life and identity of its own and to feel fully formed as a piece in its own right. There's nothing here that feels unnecessary, as if it was purpose-built to fill time and accompany something onscreen. Only the closing strains of "Absolutely Curtains," featuring the chanting of the Mapuga tribe, feels vaguely dependent on the film to be totally effective, although it's still an affecting and interesting moment without any visual accompaniment. Of course, this sense of independence may well be a deliberate move on Floyd's part considering that they fell out with the film company shortly after the soundtrack's completion, leading to it being released as an independent album with a different title rather than being released under the title of the film itself. Having not seen the film, I couldn't comment on whether the band made any alterations to the final versions of some songs in order to make it feel more like their own work than an ordinary film soundtrack, but it's a possibility.

Regardless, it certainly shows the band being far more committed, gutsy and original than on More. There is none of the meandering and ponderousness of that album here, merely one great song after another. It's also perhaps the first album where, on every song, every single band member feels totally integrated with the band as a unified whole. Earlier, Floyd had experimented with separating their albums into individual solo works (on Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother), or things had very much felt like they were being steered by the guiding hands of David Gilmour and Roger Waters. Of course, Gilmour and Waters still shoulder the majority of the songwriting duties here, but there's none of the tyranny and absolute control that Waters would come to exercise over the band by the end of the 70s. Rather, it feels like the four of them have finally come together as a truly unified whole. This is nowhere better expressed (perhaps in the band's entire discography) than on this album's devastating opening salvo of "Obscured By Clouds/When You're In." Considering that Obscured By Clouds is a little-known interim soundtrack project from before their glory days, it's ironic to think that it contains one of the band's all-time greatest songs in the form of this double bill, where their sense of mood and atmosphere is expertly demonstrated. The slow drumming of Nick Mason and menacing keyboard drone from Rick Wright provide a backdrop for Gilmour's slow, pregnant guitar licks. The piece shuffles through its portentous groove, anchored by Waters' ponderous bass, before exploding into the monstrous release that announces "When You're In," now blasting its way through the same song structure but this time with all the ferocity and energy that had been kept sinister and restrained on the first run through.

The rest of the album never matches up to the early brilliance of that opening instrumental, but it does its best. "The Gold It's In The..." is an uncharacteristically straightforward, but brilliant, rocker, more or less in the thrashing vein of "The Nile Song" from More. "Childhood's End" is driven by Wright's organ frills and flairs and marches its way through an undeniably cool stomp and "Mudmen" is another glorious instrumental showcase for Gilmour's searing, passionate guitar over Wright's plangent, mordant organ. Unusually considering his later prominence in the band's work, Waters is largely relegated to the sidelines, with Gilmour being the central figure far more frequently. One of Waters' moments to shine, however, is the brilliant "Free Four," a song whose jaunty, T. Rex-esque pop arrangement hides the snide, cynical lyrics that would become his trademark, concerning, for the first of many times in Floyd history, the death of Waters' father. Waters' sneered, cynical vocals are a joy. The other song worthy of note is Waters and Wright's beautiful "Stay," which gives Wright an unusual opportunity to take on the lead vocals of a song without sharing the role with anybody else. His voice has less character than Waters' and is less musical than Gilmour's, but there's something about its unaffected simplicity that makes it perhaps more emotionally affecting than anything either of the band's other vocalists can muster. In a band not known for their profound ballads, "Stay" certainly ranks highly as one of their most beautiful songs, exploring the frustrations of a casual sexual relationship, with Wright's elegiac piano given the greatest opportunity to emote that it would ever receive in the Floyd discography, aside from "The Great Gig In The Sky."

There's nothing on Obscured By Clouds that feels remotely unnecessary or needless, although some songs are admittedly better than others. Perhaps the fade-out with the Mapuga tribe's chanting goes on too long, but it's a small complaint to make considering the fact that most soundtrack albums contain at least a couple of supernumerary tracks to fill up time while something more interesting happens onscreen. With Obscured By Clouds, Floyd succeeded in the task of creating perhaps the most consistently entertaining soundtrack album of all time, while also finding time to write some of their best little-known songs while they were about it. The album did surprisingly well in the US for an obscure soundtrack from a little-known English psychedelic group. It didn't set the charts alight, but was the first Floyd album to get a decent chart rating across the pond, while "Free Four" also did fairly well as a single. Having met Schroeder's demand and reinvigorated themselves by throwing themselves into a totally new musical project, Floyd returned their attentions to their ongoing principal concern - The Dark Side Of The Moon. The next step they took would be the one that turned them into musical legends.

Track Listing:

1. Obscured By Clouds (David Gilmour & Roger Waters)

2. When You're In (David Gilmour; Roger Waters; Richard Wright & Nick Mason)

3. Burning Bridges (Roger Waters & Richard Wright)

4. The Gold It's In The... (David Gilmour & Roger Waters)

5. Wot's...Uh The Deal? (David Gilmour & Roger Waters)

6. Mudmen (David Gilmour & Richard Wright)

7. Childhood's End (David Gilmour)

8. Free Four (Roger Waters)

9. Stay (Roger Waters & Richard Wright)

10. Absolutely Curtains (Roger Waters & The Mapuga Tribe)