![]() While the critics stood about unimpressed, the “Atom Heart Mother” album went to No. The choir ends it all with a heroic burst that’s straight out of a swords-and-sandals score. Gilmour again wields his slide, coaxing band, choir and horns back to full power. The careful listener is rewarded here … while others may flee. The section “Mind Your Throats, Please,” at first recalls the Beatles’ “Number Nine,” electronic noodling evolving into metallic din. The chorus goes native, descending into an aggressive chant right out of “The Exorcist.” The main theme returns in full throat, drums pounding as the French horns slice the air. Gilmour’s guitar and Wright’s B-3 take the wheel in “Funky Dung,” a white boy blues jam straight out of 10 Years After. The rock band returns in the lengthy section’s final minute, providing much-needed relief. Here is the softest of these six passages. In Mother Fore, the choir sings as if in Mass, backed by Hammond B-3 organ. Gilmour’s slide guitar turns things back to rock, with the horns reasserting the suite’s theme. We hear horses and motorcycles moving through as the French horns play bravely on, establishing the “Atom Heart Mother” theme.īreast Milky offers a cello part, framed by Richard Wright’s loopy organ riff and a supple bass. French horns manage a woobly fanfare, soon set straight by a display of of Pink Floyd’s rock muscle. The suite consisted of six parts, the parameters of each on the fuzzy side:įather’s Shout sneaks in with 30 seconds of near-silence - a faint buzz. Other key instruments in the piece are French horns and cello. Of the Pink Floyd members, only Gilmour gets a solo section. Geesin arranged the work, calling in the John Aldiss Choir and an orchestral brass section, which collectively soared above the psychedelic band’s basic tracks of guitar, drums and keyboards. They turned to British avant-garde composer Ron Geesin, who’d done an offbeat side project with Waters. In 1970, Pink Floyd had been performing in concert an extended piece that would come to be variously known as “Theme From an Imaginary Western,” “Epic” and “Amazing Pudding.” Gilmour and Waters reportedly wanted to write a classically structured work around its themes, but came up frustrated. (Update: The album was rereleased as part of the 2011 Pink Floyd upgrades.) So of course plenty of Pink Floyd diehards love the “Atom Heart Mother” suite, all 24 minutes of it. Rolling Stone agreed, calling the suite “awful schmaltzy” and “a step headlong into the last century … a dissipation of (Pink Floyd’s) collective talents.” ![]() Waters, creator of “ The Wall,” later suggested that the piece should “never (be) listened to by anyone ever again.” Guitarist David Gilmour called it “pretty horrible” - “absolute crap.” Roger Waters picked up a copy of the Evening Standard newspaper, in which he found a story about a woman about to receive a nuclear-powered pacemaker.Īnd so we have “Atom Heart Mother,” one of the band’s most-debated works, a sprawling suite that’s by turns exhilarating, monotonous, hypnotic, pretentious and primeval. Oddly, Pink Floyd never made a full psych-folk album in the vein of “If” and Gilmour’s “Fat Old Sun,” which becomes even more of a shame when they end Atom Heart Mother with “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,” a cut-and-paste assemblage of sounds that never coalesces into much of anything.The year 1970 found Pink Floyd in search of a title for their latest musical exploration, a psychedelic suite of sorts. In particular, Waters’ “If” stands among his best compositions, and with his low vocals and Richard Wright’s breezy piano, the song actually brings to mind Nick Drake’s first two records (trivia: Drake’s producer, Joe Boyd, also helmed Pink Floyd’s first single, “Arnold Layne,” in 1967). ![]() The results are somewhat better, though, and almost uniformly folksy. The second half borrows the least productive idea from Ummagumma and divides songwriting duties among the band. In this case, they cast an orchestra and a choir as the leads, and the horn fanfare and choral harmonies hint at the even more ambitious arrangements throughout that decade. But “Atom Heart Mother”-all six movements-at the very least shows the band developing and entertaining new ideas, consciously moving away from the space rock label they’d been saddled with. Yes, the album stretches its six-part title track across an entire LP side, and yes, that suite meanders wildly and seemingly without purpose, as though they’re making it up as they go along but getting distracted almost constantly. They’re not exactly wrong, but they’re not exactly right either. Roger Waters and David Gilmour have spent 40 years playing this 1970 album down, labeling it pompous, overblown, embarrassing-a low point in the band’s creative history. ![]()
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