You wouldn’t be too far off in assuming that Pink Floyd were scrambling for ideas after Atom Heart Mother overextended their ambition; it’s an assessment the band members themselves made in hindsight, after all. But the making of Meddle turned out in the end to be one of those rare “now what” phases that actually proved to be even more creatively lucrative than some of their meticulously-planned concept records. Just drop the needle on Side 2 and leave it there for 23 ½ empathy-seeking minutes: “Echoes” was an abstraction in origin, pieced together with sketched-out musical contributions from all four members, that evolved magnificently into a go-to classic in the band’s catalog. It’s one of those rare sidelong art-rock suites that flows more like an R&B-rooted rock song than a hopped-up classical composition, closer in its emotionally aware and soul-savvy psychedelia to Hot Buttered Soul than Tales of Topographic Oceans (and sneaks in one of the best ambient interludes to ever predate Brian Eno’s innovations). If you can see The Dark Side of the Moon on the horizon after listening to “Echoes,” the Side 1 cuts point in a few stranger directions — some of them frivolous (the dog-howl folk blues of “Seamus”; the uncharacteristically cheery music-hall tourism of “San Tropez”), some deeply affecting (the adversity-battling acoustic ballad “Fearless,” famous for its coda featuring a Liverpool F.C. crowd’s rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”), and a leadoff cut, the galloping slow-dawn horror of “One of These Days,” that sounds like the violent culmination of their late ’60s forays into darker turf (i.e. what happens when Eugene decides to stop being careful with that axe). They’d never sound this disjointed again — the next year was a fairly straightforward soundtrack LP; the year after, that big deal album with the prism on the front — but it put them on the path to becoming one of the biggest rock bands of their time, so who needs cohesion?

– Nate Patrin