Atom Heart Mother
I parted company with Pink Floyd around the time of The Wall. As I’ve written elsewhere, when I listen to them now it is usually to The Piper At the Gates of Dawn or Meddle. I also listen from time to time to Saucerful of Secrets. I went through a recent phase of revisiting Dark Side of the Moon, though I rapidly learned to skip Great Gig In The Sky. Then I stopped playing it again. I write all of that to get my priors out in the open; I ought to add that I first listened to the Floyd in the early seventies and they soundtracked my schooldays.
Atom Heart Mother is, I suppose, the point beyond which there is no trace of Syd Barrett era whimsy or their early sound. This is where they lay the foundations for their own stereotype. Like a lot of Pink Floyd, in large part it proceeds at a hypnotic, repetitive tempo with bluesy fills on top. There are also a lot of snatches of sound that foreshadow, and got better expression on, both Meddle and DSOTM.
The title track, that occupied all of side one of the LP, is experimental and the orchestral and choral aspects of it were conjured up by Ron Geesin. He tries his best, bless him, but struggled with the harmonically uninteresting base material provided by the band.
I liked Richard Wright’s Summer ’68 (just as his Remember A Day on Saucerful of Secrets is one of my favourite Pink Floyd tracks from any point in their career) and there are some nice moments on Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast, but there’s a dull earnestness about this album that leaves me unmoved.
There’s a problem with architecture students who think they’re Frank Lloyd Wright but are really designing council estates that don’t even rise to the level of brutalist. Atom Heart Mother is music for compact modern residences with central heating, a manageable garden with a rotary drier, and room in the communal parking area for a second-hand Ford Cortina.
I listened on Spotify but, hey, it’s Pink Floyd so you’ll find it everywhere, in multiple remastered editions, few of them cheap.
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