If you exclude the motion picture soundtrack to "Obscured by Clouds", this is by far the least talked about 70's album by these guys. I'm not entirely surprised by this, since it very obviously suffers from They Made Better Albums Later syndrome, but I still wonder why it is that casual fans often times shrug their shoulders at it. It's solid on its own, and completely independent of the classic albums that followed it, thus making it still worthy of praise half a century later.
The biggest draw is of course the title track, their first but also weakest attempt at a 20+ minute suite (I'm classifying "Shine on Your Crazy Diamond" as one of them for comparison purposes only). The main theme that opens and closes the track is great, easily the melody building on the whole album, as is the funky bit in the middle. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of the 'noise' section that begins just short of the 16 minute mark, it doesn't stick around long enough for it to become annoying. As entire piece, "Atom Heart Mother" flows extremely well from section to section, lending itself to being easy to digest despite its runtime.
The second longest song is "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", which gets a little too much flak if you ask me. Alan Styles doesn't come off as the most interesting of characters. He gives me no reason to care that he wants to fuck marmalade, but I do appreciate the sense of homeliness that his musings provide to the track. He's really only blabbering for like a quarter of the song anyway, and the true instrumental portions of it are quite nice, so frankly I don't see what the issue is.
The band gets all of the ambition out of their system with these pieces, since what falls between them are not the most adventurous of songs. "If" and "Fat Old Sun" are both intimate affairs, and while the first of these doesn't evolve much, "Fat Old Sun" starts to rock towards the back end. My second favorite track on here is "Summer of '68". It certainly fits into the 'happy hippie' category but it still sounds genuine. Definitely Beach Boys influenced, especially with those vocal harmonies, but it still mistakably Pink Floyd.
I've seen many people say that without "Meddle" there's no "Dark Side of The Moon" but the truth is that without "Atom Heart Mother" there's no "Meddle". It was small jump from here to there, but "Atom Heart Mother" laid the groundwork for Pink Floyd's future as one of the world's most revered rock bands. To me, this is where they really started to flex their creative muscles.