Pink Floyd-Obscured By Clouds (1972)

Pink Floyd's fifth album is one of their most underrated and unknown records to the general public. Despite being recorded in early 1971 at the famous Château de Hérouville, it wasn't released until a year later. This was partly because it was actually the soundtrack for the French film "La Vallée", directed by Barbet Schroeder, thus coinciding with the film's release, and partly to avoid overlapping with the release of PF's fourth album, "Meddle", which, although recorded later, wouldn't be released until almost the end of 1971. Despite being considered another of PF's transitional albums, "Obscured by Clouds" is an excellent work that exudes unmistakable melodies with the band's characteristic sound, highlighting magnificent instrumentation and an interesting narrative. However, it departs somewhat from their usual sound, with a musical structure that moves away to some extent from the conceptual progressive rock of their earlier and later works. Here, Pink Floyd explore musical freedom through improvisation, while also incorporating less atmospheric and more conventional passages with a certain psychedelic tone. The album opens with the atmospheric instrumental title track, followed by the vibrant and equally instrumental rock song "When You're In", the relaxed "Burning Bridges", and the dense "The Gold It's In The..." which, along with "Childhood's End", represents the closest to Pink Floyd's usual sound. The rest of the album is more focused on the imagery of the aforementioned film, such as the strange "Absolutely Curtains", or the relaxed "Stay" and "Wot's...Uh The Deal", while the energetic "Free Four" adds a psychedelic touch. Unlike Pink Floyd's previous soundtrack, "More" from 1969, this one strangely opted for a more conventional and less dense and atmospheric song format, which represented a major departure from the band's more progressive and creative approach at that time, when they were experimenting and in the midst of a process of musical identification, something that was hinted at in the aforementioned "Meddle", or in the one before it, "Atom Heart Mother", and which would definitively explode in the following and monumental "The Dark Side Of The Moon".