Starting with A Saucerful of Secrets, Pink Floyd came into their own as the type of band they are: an instrumental band with a mix of long compositions and shorter songs with a mellow sound and thoughtful lyrics. Whatever the quality of the previous albums, their imprint is on each of them. However with Obscured By Clouds they seem to have decided to throw that style away by attempting to make a rock album, while still retaining their imprint on it. The result? It’s so unlike Pink Floyd and that’s what makes this album great.
It’s quite interesting that that’s the sound they got because like More, this is a soundtrack album for a movie called La Vallee, but this album is high and above the soundtrack album for More. Quite frankly, this is their best album since Piper. Meddle may have had “Echoes,” but Obscured By Clouds contains what a lot of Pink Floyd albums lack: pure rock ’n’ roll energy. The guitars are very prominent; it seems as if David Gilmour was the main creative force on this album.
I’ve decried Pink Floyd’s attempts at hard rock before (“The Nile Song,” “Ibiza Bar” and “One Of These Days”), so I never thought I’d say that the best song on a Pink Floyd album is a hard rock song. “The Gold It’s In The…” is a song that would fit perfectly on a classic rock radio station; with its driving crunchy riff and great guitar solo, it’s the perfect song to listen to in the car. Roger Waters’ composition “Free Four” was the song that was released as the album’s single but while playful, its extremely repetitive nature prevented the song from charting; they should have released “The Gold It’s In The…” as a single.
“Childhood’s End” acts as the mature flip side to “The Gold It’s In The…”: it’s not traditionally hard rock the same way “The Gold It’s In The…” is and the beginning is quite boring. Once Gilmour’s vocals kick in, the song maintains a good level of energy, not to mention some great lyrics (you can’t go wrong taking inspiration from a novel of the same name by the great sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke). Their other attempts at hard rock on the album, the instrumentals “Obscured By Clouds,” “When You’re In” (the best of them) and “Mudmen,” are all solid as well.
While the success of the attempts at hard rock may rely on their uniqueness in Pink Floyd’s discography, the worst song on the album, “Absolutely Curtains,” suffers from sounding too much like a bad Pink Floyd song; especially with the chant by a tribe called the Mapuga that ends the song. It’s unfortunate that it closes out the album, but there’s enough solid songs on Obscured By Clouds to make up for the song’s drudgery.
The album does lose some of its energy at points because it is also dominated by the normal slower songs (“Stay” and “Burning Bridges” are filler in the classic sense of the word), but “Wot’s…Uh The Deal” is their best acoustic song since “Crying Song”; it contains great piano work from Wright, soulful vocals from Gilmour and sad yet mature lyrics about growing older and losing some of the youthful energy you once had.
Obscured By Clouds is the closest they got to making a stripped down rock album. All of the songs are relatively short; none of the songs on here exceed six minutes. It’s safe to say that this is the most unpretentious album that Pink Floyd made because let’s face it, Pink Floyd was a pretentious band. They had every right to be and that’s not necessarily an insult; they walked a very fine line of being pretentious while being accessible, something that other progressive rock bands like King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Yes and early Genesis weren’t able to do. It’s amazing that they recorded such a strong album during the recording of their next album; that album that would give a necessary boost to Pink Floyd’s career.
Track List (Ranked Strongest To Weakest)
- The Gold It’s In The…
- Wot’s…Uh The Deal
- When You’re In
- Childhood’s End
- Obscured By Clouds
- Free Four
- Stay
- Mudmen
- Burning Bridges
- Absolutely Curtains
