Album Review: Pink Floyd's "Obscured By Clouds"

You had no idea Pink Floyd released an album called Obscured By Clouds, did you? No idea. All you know is “Wish You Were Here” and “Comfortably Numb.” You don’t know nothin about nothin!

But to give you an idea of how somewhat uncharacteristically stripped down Obscured By Clouds is for a Pink Floyd album, its foreboding opening instrumental title track was used by my high school football team for our entrance music as we approached the field (go JC Chasez Mennonite School! Class of ‘04!). We couldn’t have instilled such primitive fear in our opponents with more polished, intricate Floyd instrumentals like “A Saucerful of Secrets” or “One Of These Days” (unless we skipped forward to the “I’m going to cut you into little pieces” part). 

“Foreboding” isn’t a rare adjective to Floyd’s music, but the grittiness of this guitar and prehistoric synth-dominated title track opened an album that found the band hurriedly, though craftily, writing and recording the soundtrack to a French adventure drama, La Vallee (that is, The Valley, for the laypersons). Two of the songs contained were straight ahead rock, the rowdy instrumental “When You’re In” and the searing, crunchy “The Gold It’s In the...” (I don’t know what the gold is in, that’s just the title of the song). The band had approached such heavy territory before on an earlier film soundtrack album, More (the film of which was coincidentally directed by Barbet Schroeder, who was also at the helm for La Vallee); two songs from that album, “The Nile Song” and “Ibiza Bar” had approached outright heavy metal.

Soundtrack work was nothing new to Pink Floyd, but most of More, and their contributions to the film Zabriskie Point, were very Floydian – psychedelic pieces carefully textured and shaped by painstaking improvisations and ideas conceived on stage. Obscured By Clouds, however, found the band on a time crunch, locked away in a studio in France, in a rush to get back on the road, then back to Abbey Road to finish what would be their next album, Dark Side of the Moon.

The fact that this album had the misfortune to be released not even a full year before Dark Side undoubtedly contributes to its lack of a reputation. It would become their first album to crack the US Top 50, reaching #46, but Dark Side of the Moon’s decade-plus long stay on the album charts will always overwhelm such a feat. And, unlike their previous albums, none of the ten songs here were shaped over time by live performances before being hammered out in the studio – the songs here were “proper” rock songs, conceived and recorded on the clock. The result was an atypical Pink Floyd album, but a striking and highly enjoyable one nonetheless.

The jaunty, jangly, catchy “Free Four” enjoyed a bit of airplay when released as a single, though it’s doubtful that fans appreciated Roger Waters’ grim cynicism in the lyrics exploring death and futility. It also contains possibly his first reference to being “the dead man’s son,” a keystone in his music’s inspiration as time went on and his father’s death in World War II made more of an impact. The song was probably the first in Floyd’s entire catalog to so prominently feature that trademark grimness that made Waters’ lyrics so great; “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk,” from the band’s groundbreaking debut The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, had been his first sole credit with the group. Unless I’m misinterpreting the nonsense in the poppy psychedelia, those lyrics held a shade of that cynical English wit, though they lay under the surface of Piper’s electronic, whimsical wonderland. But the other band members, and many fans, agree that “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk” is the lone throwaway from their legendary debut.

Their next album, A Saucerful of Secrets, saw Waters’ songwriting breakout, with such staples as “Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun” and “Let There Be More Light.” But it’s the psychotic “Corporal Clegg” that hinted – or, rather flatout boasted – of the subjects and themes that would dominate Roger Waters’ later songwriting, both with Pink Floyd and in his solo career. The song told the tale of an amputee war veteran and his alcoholic wife. Grim things indeed, but grim things only the English can turn into an overbearing pop tune complete with kazoo coda.

For the next five years, though, Waters’ lyrics mostly stayed within the frame of the psychedelic noodling that made Floyd such an underground sensation throughout the world (except, so far, the States). But “Free Four” was a sudden release of a dour world view, the bassist sculpting a rotting skull with a gap-toothed grin.

Elsewhere throughout Obscured By Clouds, the lyrics follow, more tightly than at first glance, the theme of the La Vallee film, exploring the simple but daunting themes of unalterable change and the dangers and depths that lie beyond one’s comforts. The film explores the same: a group of explorers search for treasure or gold or some spiritual journey or something in a mysterious and dangerous place in Papua New Guinea simply marked on maps as “obscured by clouds.” The characters in the movie see a slow shedding of what they know as civilization until they themselves become trodden by the unknown things so far from their homes. The lyrics of Obscured By Clouds reflect this of course, which in a strange way gives it parallels with the themes of Dark Side of the Moon. 

As that album was a master portrait of the pressures of society than can lead one to absolute madness, this album slowly tracks the pressures that come with drastic change. The mid-tempo “Burning Bridges” is self-explanatory, as is David Gilmour’s “Childhood’s End” (incidentally the last Pink Floyd lyrics not written by Waters until 1987, years after he’d left the group on acrimonious terms). Purportedly with the Vietnam War in mind, Gilmour’s lyrics are much simpler than Waters’, but anything more detailed and sardonic would have been ill-fitting for such a frank lecture about the death of innocence.

While the basic narrative of the album is what makes it so strong, there are times its instrumental passages are, at the risk of hyperbole, spellbinding. “Mudmen” is my second favorite Floyd song of all time, in case you were wondering what’s my second favorite Floyd song of all time. In La Vallee, the song plays as a group of mud-covered tribal warriors or shamans, or whatever they are, in hideous, gargantuan masks dance and stalk towards a transfixed character. The song is a beautiful slowburner, grinding from melancholy to ecstasy, and was the first Pink Floyd song penned by Gilmour and keyboardist Rick Wright; it was a great dose of the musical partnership they’d form twenty years later on The Division Bell and after Floyd was done "for good" in the 2000s.

Speaking of Wright, his vocal on “Stay,” one of the band’s few “ballads,” is almost spine-tingling. The keyboardist was often critical of his voice, but its lonesomeness fits the loss and finality of the song’s lyrics. Closing the album is “Absolutely Curtains,” a gorgeous yet frightening instrumental that seems to perpetually build and build until its stunning crescendo leads into an excerpt from the film – a choir of tribesmen singing words in an exotic language that, if interpreted, would dash the mystery that lends itself so perfectly to the song.

Obscured By Clouds isn’t usually included in the lineage of Floyd works that were essential to the development of Dark Side of the Moon as is, say, the track “A Saucerful of Secrets” in 1969; the twelve-minute instrumental had been a thematic, conceptual, multi-part story, which led to “The Man & The Journey Suite” that became a focus of the band’s legendary live repertoire during the same era, further shaping their penchant for storytelling via instrumental texture. In 1971, Meddle had been vital to Dark Side of the Moon’s birth, if not in terms of structure, in terms of the quantum leaps in studio knowledge and innovation. 

But Obscured is exactly that – fogged over in the history of Pink Floyd as it relates to the elements that ultimately led to Dark Side and beyond.

The rub is, it shouldn’t be. The album tells a story, its music shapes the events and moods, and an overall, solid narrative focusing on change and departure runs consistently throughout – just the way the narratives of madness and societal pressure shape Dark Side of the Moon. Granted, Obscured By Clouds had a movie to follow. But even in that sense, Pink Floyd looked beyond slapping some mood music onto forty minutes of tape and chose rather to make a proper album using La Vallee’s story.

Though obviously decimated in sales and memory by its successor, such was the success of this record throughout the faithful European market in 1972 that it eclipsed the film for which it was recorded, which performed lukewarmly. A dispute between the band and the film studio arose, for whatever reasons those disputes always arise, and in response, the studio re-titled the movie to The Valley Obscured By Clouds, to hopefully capitalize on the positive reception the album enjoyed over the film, particularly in France.

Much like the treasure and spiritual whatnots sought by the characters in the film, Obscured By Clouds is in many ways the post-Piper, pre-Dark Side album that holds the most reward for those who seek it out. It’s not only a solid and well-written album, especially considering the rushed atmosphere of the sessions, but it captures Pink Floyd in a very non-Floydian snapshot.

It’s the perfect definition of a hidden gem.

-from my book Rocktology Exam: Classic Rock's Hidden Gems (but you don't have to buy it)