Pink Floyd
Atom Heart Mother

The Pink Floyd were, besides being great musicians, cunning authors of charming albums almost always adorned with shockingly captivating covers that have rightly gone down in History. Here, there's a chubby cow that, with its round posterior, seems to smilingly mock us (later would come the spatial geometries of "Dark Side of the Moon," and then, as a last great hurrah, the unsettling gray wall of "The Wall").

We are obviously talking about "Atom Heart Mother," one of Pink Floyd's greatest commercial successes and one of the most famous albums in music history. The album is not perfect, let's make it clear from the start, yet extremely experimental and bold. We're not at the level of "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (levels, otherwise, practically unattainable), but we are still faced with a dizzying and abysmal record, a luminous example of what those geniuses of Pink Floyd were able to compose in the full psychedelic and feminist era (it's necessary to remember that Pink Floyd never expressed themselves clearly about political and moral issues, except to expose all their fears and anxieties, even political, in "The Wall," 1979).

"Atom Heart Mother" is more definable as a 'musical work at the limits of lyricism' rather than pop music or, worse yet, sophisticated psychedelia. It is an ambitious and experimental record: the first, very long part, is composed of "Atom Heart Mother," an energetic soft-pop revisitation of a certain, sometimes unfair, way of conceiving American music (many guitars, bass, and violins resonate), with the very intelligent addition of a strong melodic and instrumental vision that accentuates, in some passages almost violently, the desire to transgress and turn, as if it were a sock, the entire Anglophone musical hierarchy (the Pink Floyd mock, in an almost indecent manner, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones). Yet, paradoxically, it's precisely "Atom Heart Mother" that is the weak point of the entire album: great music, great instrumental abilities, here and there many (too many) stretches that always risk weighing down and, moreover, forcing the concept of originality and modernity. Stretches that, despite many good chisellings (see "Dark Side of the Moon"), were one of the limits, and for some one of the merits, of the legendary English band led by the genius Roger Waters.

More successful is the second side. A fascinating triptych, "If", "Riser and shine", "Summer '68" shine, and move, without tricks or compromises. Fascinating music, avant-garde sounds, unsurpassable melodies: this is the best, and perhaps the maximum, that the early 1970s Pink Floyd can aspire to. Literally to be dissected and studied, the way the English band disassembles and reassembles, quite naturally, the most disparate avant-garde melodies and seeks, perhaps a bit forcibly, to create new styles and trends. Yet, despite some flaws, Waters' bass and David Gilmour's guitar (who replaced the excellent Syd Barrett in 1968) are, as always, a guarantee of genius and perfection.

"Atom Heart Mother," an epochal album nonetheless, can be considered the direct descendant of "Ummagumma," a famous Pink Floyd record dated 1969 (it was a double album in which the English band enjoyed tearing down and mending rock), yet this "Atom Heart Mother" is even superior: a track like "If" is, as the saying goes, worth the price of admission. An album, like all those of Pink Floyd, to be listened to carefully without disturbances or noise.

Huge sales success that was followed, as previously succeeded, by a massive world tour and an unexpected cinematic popularity: "hired" by Michelangelo Antonioni, they expertly curated the soundtrack of the famous "Zabriskie Point."