Pink Floyd 5: Atom Heart Mother

Pink Floyd certainly couldn’t be faulted for trying. Much of their earlier work had stretched on stage, and now they were ready for something even more daring. How about an extended work with orchestra and choir to fill up an album side? Sounds great, right? That was indeed the piece that gave Atom Heart Mother its title, if not the cover photo.

The suite is divided into six parts, mostly based around a basic theme for brass. The piece builds and calms, with solos on organ and cello, melding seamlessly into a wordless choral section. Ten minutes in, a typical Floyd “funk jam” takes over for five minutes, augmented by choir, and tumbling into another four minutes of electronic effects and much stumbling about in the studio. The piece culminates with a restatement of the main theme, bringing everything full circle.

For those with less patience, the second side is mostly simpler songs, something of an extension of the “solo” work on Ummagumma. “If” is another Roger Waters folk song, gentle on the surface but disturbed underneath. “Summer ‘68” is a pop song from Rick Wright, beginning pleasantly but also fraught with tension and punctuated by brass. David Gilmour is still trying to find his quiet voice on “Fat Old Sun”, his nerves redeemed by a great slow fade under his guitar solo. Most critics (and some fans) howled with derision at “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”, wherein one of the band’s roadies can be heard preparing and eating bacon and cereal, gulping some kind of beverage, chewing with his mouth open and adding occasional commentary. Underneath, the band plays a few variations on some pleasant Floydian melodies.

Atom Heart Mother doesn’t get a lot of respect, for many of the reasons listed above. With the exception of the three songs on side two, it’s not an easy listen, and takes a lot of patience. But if you can dig through the experiments, which few other bands would consider attempting (and why would they?), you’ll be rewarded with some excellent music.

Pink Floyd Atom Heart Mother (1970)—3½