Review Summary: Just as epic as its album art.
Atom Heart Mother is often regarded as conceptless, incomplete and disorganised. Indeed, it is, but the circumstances can explain why it is what it is.
Before 1970 Pink Floyd was known as a psychedelic and drug-orientated band, but the members didn't quite accept the impression that they were giving to the public opinion, as they announce during the interviews in the DVD
Live at Pompeii: Director's Cut, so it was very important to blow away this "bad reputation" and start composing something more mature and original.
This is in fact the first album that sees them in the progressive rock scene, in which Pink Floyd will be absolute protagonists throughout the Seventies, still maintaining their space-rock and psychedelic roots.
The only thing they needed to achieve this important goal for their career were ideas, and since there were none, all the members set to work on their own as they did in 1968 for
A Saucerful of Secrets just to meet at the end and put together what they came up with.
Five tracks were born eventually: two suites (written by the four members, putting together the more ideas they could) and three 5-minute-long songs (sung by their own composers). This is why the record is more like a compilation than a solid team-made album, but despite that fact the whole thing works better than you could expect.
The title itself has apparently no meaning, and the fat cow on the cover seems to have no relation at all with the content of the album, but it is very efficient in capturing your attention while walking down the record store shelves.
The 23-minute-long title-track is an instrumental machine of psychedelia, with a confusing orchestral accompaniment. Listening to this in 2014 could sound more like classical music (not of course throughout its whole length, but at least during the refrain), but at the beginning of the Seventies it was something revolutionary.
The refrain is repeated three times, and on the way from one to another you will hear guitar and keyboard solos, drums, a choir shouting "Atom", or perhaps "Mother", or probably something else, and another dozen kinds of noises and sounds.
It is chaotic, but this is its beauty, and it's only when after several minutes of chaos a voice shouts "Silence in the studio!" and the band starts playing the right tune, you really understand how exquisite this track is.
The next three tracks are all slow and melancholic.
If is an acoustic-guitar-lead ballad, with portions of slide guitar, whose lyrics, written by Waters, are probably the most touching on the album.
This doesn't mean that the other songs can't compete with it, because
Summer '68, Wright's composition, is a more complete song, concerning also drums, piano and trumpet in its accompaniment. It is about the short love stories that the pianist experienced during Pink Floyd tours, meeting different girls in every town, the consequences of these affairs and the frustration that followed them, explicitly stated in the last strophe:
Goodbye to you
Shall it bring girls due
I've had enough for one day.
Fat Old Sun is another, underrated Pink Floyd song. The lyrics are pure poetry and the atmosphere is very relaxing and of course, suitable for a summer day sunset. The outro is also amazingly performed by Gilmour on the guitar and it brings you into another dimension.
The other suite is probably one of the most hated tracks from this band, probably because it recalls too much the echoes of
Ummagumma, which frankly was a bad album.
Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast is indeed, as the title suggests,
very psychedelic. But, even if less accessible than the Suite (and the Suite itself is not that accessible), its noises and voices describe perfectly an everyday-life situation such as breakfast and all the other things you, sleepy and drowsy as you can only be in the morning, do or try to do.
Throughout this experimental track you will hear pianos and water drops, guitars and people eating and sipping quite noisily, speaking unwisely once in a while. The melodies that accompany the whole scenario is catchy, feel-good and enjoyable.
I agree that many people could find the noises very irritant and superfluous, but hey, this is Pink Floyd, and this is how they used to do music, experimenting and trying to create their own sound, which eventually was consecrated in
The Dark Side of the Moon. Without this album we wouldn't have had the "classic" Pink Floyd, and mostly, this album is, like
Meddle, a perfect mix of progressive and psychedelia.
5/5
