ATOM HEART MOTHER

"Atom Heart Mother" is a weird album for PINK FLOYD, seems like a band who has just left Psychedelia (not completely though) and they are trying to find a new sound in Prog, remember we are talking about 1970 when the genre still hadn't developed and there was nothing such as Space Prog in any catalogue.

Not bad at all, very ambitious but some parts don't sound as PINK FLOYD at any era, it's a one in a kind album, that probably doesn't satisfy the fans completely.

The opener is the epic "Atom Heart Mother", which starts with an outstanding piece of Orchestral Neo Classical or Avant Garde piece of music, very complex and elaborate, not what I could expect of the band, specially when I had heard most of their albums before this one.

Ron Geesin does an outstanding job with orchestra and choirs, very pompous and I would dare to say close to Symphonic, but about the middle of the song when Gilmour and Wright enter we can listen for the first time in the album the sound that made them famous, pure Psychedelic jamming in the best style you can get, but again the orchestra joins more pompous than before, until the weird stuff begins, sound effects, noises, spooky choirs, now we are before PINK FLOYD, even when more adventurous than ever just to end with the full orchestra.

The weirdest song I would have ever expected of a normally atmospheric band, really nice stuff that may be more appreciated by Symphonic fans than by the real followers of the band. 22 minutes of pure Progressive Rock, I guess Alan parsons took some ideas from this otrack for his most pompous song in Pyramids like "n the Lap of the Gods" and What Goes Up"

"If" is a softer acoustic track that flows gently until the final section when Gilmour gives us a bit of what we like to listen from him, nice relaxing song.

"Summer '68" is another track hard to expect from PINK FLOYD, very melodic and soft, until the middle when they hit us hard with some sort of BEATLES influenced music, this ratifies my initial opinion that "Atom Heart Mother" is the middle of the road between Barrett and the peak of the band.

"Fat Old Sun" is a classic, still not totally the band we learned to love but they are inn the way, well blended with the ballad we can listen the essence of later albums, great track.

The album is closed with "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", to be honest I never understood this track is supposedly dedicated to Alan parsons who had his first encounter with PINK FLOYD in this album and not in DSOTM as most people believe.

Too long for what they pretend, if a band wants to be experimental for the first time in a big project, 13 minutes is too much, not bad but nothing special either.

Now how to rate it= Despite being weird for them, the first epic deserves 5 stars, but the rest of the album is so uneven that they seem lost somewhere in between two worlds and it's not worth two stars, 3.5 stars would be perfectly fair, but will have to be conservative and go with 3 solid stars.