I suspect if you are trawling around tempted by a new genre you may be looking at Floyd as a possible door to be opened. I suspect though, you will not start with ‘Obscured by clouds’ as it hardly features at the top of their well-known stash.
Initially recorded as a soundtrack to a hippie oriented film entitled ‘La Vallee’ I suspect the film benefitted from the recording as their next offering was DSOTM from which point…well I guess you know the rest. Allegedly due to a spat between the band and the film company there was little correlation between film title and LP title apart from an obscure reference in the film about clouds and thus a subscript was added to the film for it to benefit from the Floyd connection.
What you get is very typical Floyd and whilst DSOTM will get the plaudits, there are passages on here that can come from no other band than Floyd, high pitched screeching guitar solos with a thunderous drum accompaniment and mellow lyrics (no Sir R. Plant variations on here), the only differential in my mind is that they don’t go off on one. All the tracks are tightly managed and just when you think you are in for a 10 minute toe tapping exercise, they aren’t quite there. Whether they didn’t have the confidence at this stage or because it was a soundtrack, I’m not sure. But witness ‘Childhood’s End’ – it doesn’t get much better than this, but come on guys there is another good 5-6 minutes you can add on here. Instead it crosses the road and you get a quirky ‘Free four’ that is so unlike Floyd apart from Gilmour’s offering. Another great track.
