![]() ![]() What the title suite lacks in sonic and perhaps compositional excellence, it makes up for in budget ambition-which ultimately in my book makes it a highly listenable album today. The fact is, these criticisms plagued all PF’s studio output up until Meddle. Some of the criticisms leveled against the album were that the title track was poorly recorded/produced/performed (valid) that Geesin’s arrangements were intrusive and ill-conceived (not valid, imo) and also that the second half was completely unfocused and undeveloped (also quite valid). In the PF creative trajectory, the album was a direct stepping stone to their more fully-realized work on Echoes, which was in turn a straight-thru line to the long form conceptual work on DSotM- so I would say, historically AHM is very important. But like I said, it's not all bad, and it helped the band figure out what worked and what didn't a year later they released the masterpiece Echoes, and shortly after that began work on Eclipse (what became DSOTM), both excellent long-form pieces in their own right.I enjoy the album, pretty much all the way thru, with the exception of “If”, which is dreadfully ponderous and overlong by about two and half minutes. It just comes off sounding like a band that decided they wanted to do a side long "classical" piece and had no idea how to accomplish this, so they threw together whatever they could come up with and the result is a jumbled mess. That whole noise section after Funky Dung, the choral section, and the organ arpeggios right after the main theme all feel like filler to me. But it suffers for the same reason parts of Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans suffers - in a nutshell, they were trying to stretch the piece out and added a bunch of filler to accomplish this. I'm not a fan, on the whole, although I think there are very nice passages contained within (The opening theme, the Funky Dung guitar solo, the closing section/coda are all nice). ![]()
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