Pink Floyd
Obscured By Clouds
1972
Capitol Records
Out of all the Pink Floyd album out there, 1972's Obscured by Clouds has to be my favorite. Although I doubt that many other people share this opinion, I suppose in my little world of me, my thoughts are all that counts. So just to make clear, I am not here to be a preachy hipster and tell you to fall in love with this album. That would just be inane, and I know nobody wants that. Yet, I have an urge to share my thoughts on it with the progressive community.
Obscured By Clouds is the second of the two solely Pink Floyd-recorded soundtracks. The band was known to perform on other soundtracks, such as Zabriskie Point, The Comittee, and other, more obscure and less known filmscores. But the major, well know releases by the band were More (1969), and this album. The music was made for the 1972 film "La Vallée", written and directed by Barbet Schroeder. Schroeder, a well known Iranian director who's career was based in French cinema during the 60's, was the same man who directed the 1969 film More, which Pink Floyd also recorded a soundtrack for. The soundtrack for La Vallée, an album that they titled Obscured by Clouds, was indeed recorded as the soundtrack to the film, however when they had finished recording, the band promptly fell out with Imperia Films and were prompted to release the album as their own. Thus, the album was released in the year 1972, which was a year in between two well known masterpieces, Meddle (1971), and Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Due to this, the album was largely forgotten by the general public. After people had reveled in the majesty of the trifecta of Pink Floyd hit albums, Obscured By Clouds started to be slowly noticed. Critics were inclined to shrug it off as well, and the album again faded back into Obscure-ity (I'm sorry, I had to).
As for me, my friend actually found this album at a music store nearby to where I lived. Knowing that I sought the entire Pink Floyd chronology, he so kindly bought it for about five dollars and brought it over. After thanking him vigorously, I slotted the album into my computer and gave it a listen. Mind you, this was one first new listens to the band I had in over a year, and I was incredibly excited to give it a listen. At first listen, the album didn't appeal to me as much as I thought it would. I had always been a lover of the under appreciated, and that was probably why A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) was my favorite album by the band for a long time. But this sadly did not strike a chord with me like I expected it to. In fact, I was bored extremely quickly and put the case among my other albums. It sat there for an ungodly amount of time, perhaps two months or so, until I pulled it back out to give it another listen. Then, something that rarely happens with me happened with this album. On my second listen, I loved the album. In the period of time that the album was sitting in my shelf, I was researching more and more on the band in order to grasp everything I needed to know about them. I had already gained Dark Side well before this, and thoroughly enjoyed it. But during my 'studies', I found that this album came out a year before Dark Side. This was actually surprising to me, and I had come to know that usually albums that preceded masterpieces were highly influential to the band's sound. Knowing this, I came at the album with a totally different mentality, and I liked the album much more than I did at first listen.
Unlike the 1970's hit of Meddle, OBC's sound is extremely different. True, the former did propel Pink Floyd into a whole new era, but it was OBC's job to reinforce that sound. It did it very successfully. I can easily say I enjoy this more than Meddle, although I don't think that it is bad in any sense. Everything about this album is right; there is a healthy amount of tracks, a simple yet cool album cover (an unfocused picture of a man sitting in a tree, who would have guessed?), and not to mention some really fine songs. Out of the tracks, there are probably only a few that I enjoy a ton more over the others. Not to say that any of them are bad, but most of them do get sort of the same feeling out of me.
The two rockiest of the tracks, 'When You're In' and 'The Gold It's In The...', are both simple, fantastic little ditties by Gilmour. In fact, I have listened to the latter so much that it could very well become my favorite Pink Floyd song. Very Zeppelin like, especially taking into account the time of this album's release. 'Mudmen' is a nice instrumental, something that you could take a snooze to. Listening through the album may not give it the same effect, because it comes right after 'Wots...Uh the Deal', another really slow acoustic track. 'Childhood's End' is probably my second highest pick for this album. There is so much Dark side influence on it that if you'd put this next to 'Time', and I didn't know the two albums, I would swear they were from the same release. The song is really nice, and could be said that it fore-ran the whole release by giving the band the vibe it needed. 'Stay' is a Wright masterpiece. Although lyrically not as strong as one might expect, this love ballad is certainly something to listen to. So, although many people think this is non-essential, I would say otherwise. This album is really great for those fans wanting to thoroughly understand and enjoy the Pink Floyd experience.
2016 - The Frying Pan & Thatcher
Originally written for Prog Archives on 10/12/2014.
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