How does it compare to the artist's other releases
Good
Value for Money
Good
Advantages:
brilliantly creative
Disadvantages:
short track listing
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
What other band could you expect to create such a fantastically creative and musically blinding album...none, because it would seem in this world the task is only in the capabilities of Pink Floyd:
Atom Heart Mother provides a stunning colabiration between soft rock and the honest style of classical and progressive music. Despite being blaitantly contrasting to earlier efforts from Pink Floyd (i.e. Relics, the acid induced trip through seemingly random, but clearly well structured music in the form of a debut album), this change in "genre" has allowed Pink Floyd to develop their style to an extent whereby they have successfully introduced a powerful array of vocal and instrumental ideas into pretty much every track on the album...It results in some stunning originality and a great sound. Further to the actual musical content of the album is the innovative cover art, which probes deeply into the image Pink Floyd create for themselves. The cow standing in a very stereotypical field gives no insight as to what the actual content of the album may be, and consequently acts almost as a metaphor for the ideal of not wanting to be pinned to any specific approach to music. This is something Pink Floyd can pride themselves with on all of their records.
A slight drawback is the elasticity between the short amount of tracks, but the length of each track as an individual component. This still provides the buyer with a suitable amount of music (52:44 total length), but it can start to get tiresome to listen to the same track for such a meaty amount of time. An example of this is the opening song, also called "Atom Heart Mother", which is produced at an impressive 23mins. Also, there is a basic impression of no real definition between all the tracks - they all appear to be a bit lacking in diversity. This doesn't take away from the principle of originality and resourcefulness of the composition, but it does further the effects of the long track lengths mentioned above.
Overall though, the good points to Atom Heart Mother outweigh the bad points, and although it can get a bit cyclic, and lacks some of the energy that Syd Barret would have no doubt bought to the record, it does provide an ejoyable 52mins.
