Atom Heart Mother, for all its glories, was an acquired taste, and Pink Floyd wisely decided to trim back its orchestral excesses for its follow-up, Meddle. Opening with a deliberately surging "One of These Days," Meddle spends most of its time with sonic textures and elongated compositions, most notably on its epic closer, "Echoes." If there aren't pop songs in the classic sense (even on the level of the group's contributions to Ummagumma), there is a uniform tone, ranging from the pastoral "A Pillow of Winds" to "Fearless," with its insistent refrain hinting at latter-day Floyd…
Stereo 24/96 version of Meddle hidden on the Early Years box set.The Early Years 1965 - 1972 is a comprehensive 27-disc boxset that sees Pink Floyd delve into their vast music archive to produce a deluxe package that includes 7 individual book-style volumes, featuring much previously unreleased material. The Early Years box set contains unreleased tracks, BBC Radio Sessions, remixes, outtakes and alternative versions over an incredible 11 hours, 45 mins of audio (made up of 130+ tracks) and live and TV performance in over 14 hours of audio-visual material.
Following the departure of founding father Syd Barrett in 1968, Pink Floyd was forced to reassess their position on the musical map.
Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music.
The metal of the medal in a medley
Even though it (sort of) copied its layout AHM's successor did not top the charts, but instead it brought Floyd on the brink of greatness, just behind the bend. For some reasons, Meddle doesn't suffer of the same controversy than AHM did, which is rather strange, because it if has much higher and outstanding peaks, it is also much less even, because the lows on this album are simply awful. With that bizarre yet fascinating Hypgnosis artwork of mixing an ear and waterdrops on rippling the surface of calm waters, Meddle has not only a weird unnatural name, but the album was released in early 71 like its predecessor with the name and title on the cover, something that Crimson or Zep were also doing with success.
"Meddle" is the sixth studio album by English progressive rock group Pink Floyd. It was released in October 1971.
The album was recorded at a series of locations around London, including Abbey Road Studios. With no material to work with and no clear idea of the album's direction, the band devised a series of novel experiments which eventually inspired the album's signature track, "Echoes". Although many of the group's later albums would be unified by a central theme with lyrics written mainly by Roger Waters, "Meddle" was a group effort with lyrical contributions from each member.
David Gilmour said that Meddle was when it all started to come together. In a sense he was right. It started to bring them out of avante garde compositions. Meddle, is and essential piece in the Floyd cannon, surpassed only by Dark Side oF The Moon.