ATOM HEART MOTHER

Atom Heart Mother, for me, was a massive disappointment. I have been a huge fan of the pre Momentary Lapse... era Pink Floyd all my life and never expected to hear a mediocre album from them. Breaking down the title track: The brass section in Father's Shout is very aggressive and abraisive in nature which creates a displeasing contrast at points once Pink Floyd themselves come in with thier traditionally lush, mellow tones; Breast Milky brings in a choral section which gives one the impression that the arrangement is going to run along the lines of something like Black Sabbath's 'Supertzar', however, the piece lingers on too long without arousing emotion in the listener. The concept of the choir is interesting, but I feel feel that there is too much meandering without a definative climax or focal point in this section of the album to maintain the listener's intrigue; Mother Fore gets rockier, spacier and generally a bit closer towards the psychedelic bliss of the traditional Pink Floyd that we all know and love; Funky Dung then kills the enjoyment built up in the listener from the previous section as it is essentially a cacophonic 'experimental' section on keyboard. (Don't get me wrong, I love keboard solos, but this one is just noises without reason...) ; By the latter end of the piece, everything is just sounding a bit aimless and wrong. (Not memorable enough to even comment on) Next up, is the rest of the album; If, quite frankly, is boring because of a combination of monotonous lyrics and little instrumentation to patch it up; Summer '68 and Fat Old Sun, albeit that they aren't quite as catchy as most Pink Floyd, both are actually quite trippy and fun songs to hear; with ...'68 having a nice piano backing and a psychedelic chorus and ...Sun has a really cool, emotive solo from Gilmour; The final song, Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast is a bit of a letdown to say the least simply because it really isn't psychedelic at all, when you consider Floyd's other early works (So the content isn't what it says on the cover basically) It fades off into sounding like an album filler as a result of the song lacking in instrumentation. Overall, the concept of a rock band and an orchestra commingled to create a a prog epic is a good one, but theory and practice are not the same thing and it doesn't work here. Far better examples of this idea can be seen in albums such as Mahavishnu Orchestra's Apocalypse. So, all I can say is that unless you happen to be a serious collector of Pink Floyd, leave this one out and get meddle instead if you want to hear early 70's Pink Floyd.