My Rock Collection: Old Floyd

On the last post I told you about the great albums in my rock collection. Today, we'll talk about Pink floyd's Atom Heart Mother.

The other day I dug deep into my Rock Collection and found a CD that I had not played in years, it's an old Pink Floyd album called Atom Heart Mother. Featuring the back side of a cow on the cover, with head turned, looking back at you, the CD promises to be different. Apparently, the image of the cow was photographed by Storm Thorgerson, same guy who designed the Dark Side Of The Moon Cover. Storm was inspired by Andy Warhol's famous "cow-wallpaper".

Atom Heart Mother was Pink Floyd's continued exploration of progressive rock and included many interesting tunes, to say the least. Included are some old favorites like "Breast Milky" and "Funky Dung". Like Dark Side Of The Moon, Atom Heart Mother was engineered by Legendary Rock musician/producer Alan Parsons, but unlike Dark Side Of The Moon, Atom Heart was less of a concept album than what appears to be a progressive rock exploration.

There have always been mixed reviews of this album, and except for the flip-side which features more digestible Floyd like Fat Old Sun and Summer 68, side A is a Brass and Choir orgy with what appears to be occasional Digital Cow flatulence (That's the best explanation that I can think of) and other rhythmic digressions.

Atom Heart Mother seems to be more closely related to the album Ummagumma, which was also very much a psychedelic musical exploration. Unlike Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother seemed to be barely keeping its head above the water. It definitely did not have that dark, morose feel that Ummagumma did. That said, it was an interesting musical direction for Pink Floyd to have taken, and I'm glad for albums like this, that although not great are as far from the carefully contrived and mass marketed/ predictable pop music that seems to have taken over the world. It sits proudly in my rock collection.