I see Pink Floyd as earnestly trying to experiment with music and explore new frontiers, exactly like Gilmour says they were doing.

If they could only see the heights of insufferable pretentiousness yet to come in music culture in the 2000s, boy howdy! The usual rabble aimed at prog-rock bands the world over. And even Gilmour's criticism seems to sympathize. Here's the thing: Pink Floyd gets a bad rap for being pretentious and pseudo-intellectual. So he's willing to shrug and play it again, while denying all the time that he understands what all the fuss is about. Meanwhile, even with Waters stating to the effect that he wouldn't perform the title track from this album for a million pounds cold, David Gilmour still took to the stage and performed the suite again in 2008. 'Atom Heart Mother' sounds like we didn’t have any idea between us, but we became much more prolific after it.' I listened to that album recently: God, it's shit, possibly our lowest point artistically. > '.the long piece 'Atom Heart Mother.' That was a good idea but it was dreadful. Despite the fact that the album was commercially successful at the time, both Roger Waters and David Gilmour have run it down ever since.

My benevolence towards Atom Heart Mother seems to run contrary to most fans' opinion and even to the artist themselves. This is also the era of Pink Floyd when I considered them to be an alternative jam-band / stoner-rock choice if you're tired of Grateful Dead but you're also not in a Deep Purple mood. It doesn't make my top-10 or anything, but I consider it a solid entry in the Pink Floyd canon at the time, 'at the time' being Pink Floyd's earlier output (1965-1972, handily covered in the box set The Early Years). I have always loved Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother.

Atom heart mother cow