ATOM HEART MOTHER

Put it this way: Roger Waters and David Gilmour agreed on almost nothing in the immediate aftermath of Waters departing Pink Floyd, so when both Waters and Gilmour regularly go on the record as severely disliking this album you *know* something is up with it. For my part, it took me a long time to appreciate Atom Heart Mother; I finally do, but only once I stopped trying to expect it to either provide the psychedelic spacy textures of their early material or the more finely-crafted accomplishments of later works, but instead saw it as the necessary tightening-up of their command of the studio necessary to allow their classic run from Meddle to The Final Cut to take form.

Atom Heart Mother's title track is a sidelong epic in which the band try to fuse their music with orchestral material. By this point, I think it's fair to say that such experiments had ceased being novel and had started to become routine - Deep Purple had done it, the Nice did it, the Moody Blues had done it a full three years previously - and whilst the history of such efforts has always been patchy, I found Atom Heart Mother particularly hard to warm to. My usual preference for such things is for the rock group to be in the fore and for the orchestra to provide texture, but quite frequently the reverse priorities apply.

The other epic on the album, Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast, combines fairly spacey noodling from the band with breakfast sound effects that risk upstaging the track, unless you adjust to regarding them as part of the sonic texture, something which the careful engineering from Alan Parsons encourages. Solo compositions from Wright, Gilmour and Waters round out the album with some simpler musical ideas which risk seeming underdeveloped by comparison - If would make a stellar two minute song but risks trying the listeners patience by running for over four, Summer '68 engages in psych nostalgia at precisely the moment when the band needed to be defining a future for itself, and Fat Old Sun is another folky number of the sort the band were flirting with at the time.

I ended the previous version of this review by saying "When the sound of your engineer munching toast is more interesting and full of vitality than the musical accompaniment, you know you've got problems", but I think that's the issue: the album is in part an exercise in seeing if the sound of Alan Parsons munching toast can be made interesting, and listened to on good-quality headphones or speakers it certainly is. This inevitably makes it, if not an outright audiophile-only album, at least the sort of thing which gives the best results when you take your listening equipment and sources at least somewhat seriously; cheap earbuds and low-bitrate MP3s aren't going to cut it.