Atom Heart Mother, without a doubt, is the most bovine of Pink Floyd albums. Combining a band in the midst of their "wandering" years with the classical/rock music mashup craze of the time resulted in some mighty strange product.
The album consists of five songs, two of which are very long and strange and sandwich the other three. The "Atom Heart Mother Suite" is a ridiculously long track, with ample orchestration grafted on to the band's meandering twenty-plus minute jam. "If" is Roger Waters in fine microscopic form, with none of the grandiosity we would see from him in the big rock operas a decade later. "Summer '68" is probably Richard Wright's most put-together song, after struggling through the post-Barrett years to write something truly memorable. "Fat Old Sun" is David Gilmour's turn at the mic, and my what a sweet voice he had before he wrecked it with cigarettes and too many performances of "The Nile Song" from way back when. Finally Nick Mason rounds things out with other long track, the collage-like "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", which presaged some Dark Side of the Moon style innovations like the dripping water start/stop (replaced by a beating heart for the album) and assorted random mutterings.
Atom Heart Mother captured my fancy in late high school and early college, but I sort of moved away from it. As with many of the albums between Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Meddle it sports a lot of ponderous experimentation, not all of which works that well. However, it's nice to know there were people crazy enough back then to give crazy experiments like this a shot. Incidentally, this album also hit #1 in the UK, so that means there were plenty of people crazy enough to buy into it...or leaded gasoline was really taking its toll on humanity.
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