This is largely due to the influence of Ron Geesin who co-wrote the title track and the use of brass instruments and a choir to add texture and colour to the sound. Something of an enigma among their work, this is the one Floyd album which doesn't have the trade mark 'Pink Floyd Sound' be it the cosmic / nursery rhyme feel of the Syd Barrett era or the tight, lyrics dominated Roger Waters era. 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.Atom Heart Mother Album Review By James Caulfield'Atom Heart Mother' - best album title and containing the best song title ever : 'Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast'! 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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