Iconoclast (April 12, 2006)

This album is one of the underrated gems in Pink Floyds collection. The whole album has an ethereal yet complete feel, not quite a concept album but certainly a muscial journey. It includes the sublime gem 'Wot's Uh The Deal'. This song is perhaps one of the best songs Floyd have written. This song holds up to any of their big hits like 'Wish You Were Here' or 'Comfortably Numb'. If you like to play guitar, learn this song you will like it even more. I'd like to buy the rights to it and re-record it; I'd guarantee a big hit. This albums flows like a fine bottle of red wine. An excellent album that is too often neglected and over looked by the masses.

fairlight.fm (September 17, 2005)

some great songs on here the spine tingling the 70s concert opener Obscured by clouds

the soft and sensual stay

some of the best softer side of floyd ever put down on vinyl

SArah Montoya (September 10, 2004)

I had never heard of this film or the album and Pink Floyd is my all time favorite. I bought the lp used for like 8$ in immaculate condition. This is definately worth checking out if you dig the floyd I haven't been able to take it out of my player for a couple of weeks now. Childhood End is the best song on the record.

Caught between cultural bookends (August 26, 2010)

Most of the more thoughtful reviews pretty much capture my overall impression of this album...less 'psychedelic', more 'formulistic', 'post Syd recovery', 'pre-DSOTM', no 'space-jams'. Please indulge me here, but I probably pre-date most of the PF viewers (and listeners), having seen PF in 1969 (Saucer Full of Secrets tour), 1970 (Ummagumma tour), 1975? (DSOTM). The first two at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia and the last in Pittsburgh, Pa (Arena). I have to admit fully that I am in the Syd, early Floyd camp...and feel that DSOTM was akin to a commercial sell out. The album's success created a physical barrier between myself and a band I really identified with. I simply lost the ability to enjoy them any longer. The size of the performing venues changed dramatically from intimate halls populated by a mellow, spaced out audience to one in which you were surrounded by 20,000 headbangers on qualudes. At that point, around 1975, I gave up and moved on.

Looking back on the years, I none-the less fully recognize the brilliance of PF through-out its varied history. I enjoy them immensely even today (in my home - far away in space and time from the headbangers). In fact, I am trying to get my 15 year old son to stop listening to pop radio long enough to give them a critical listen.

But back to the album...OBC is certainly not one of PF's finest albums...it always seemd rushed to me and as I said, formulistic. A few gems like Wot's...Mudmen and Stay are worth the price of admission, however the album does not read as a cohesive whole, but more as a soundtrack...hey, it *is* a soundtrack...seemingly made up of discarded relics from PF's unused material bin. It should, none-the-less, be part of any PF fans collection (which is why I just bought it...not having heard it for 30+ years!) if only to capture the moment of Floyd's last year of relative obscurity when they were the ultimate cult band to one which became infused with hyper egos, super stardom, huge stage presentations and listened to by a less discerning world audience. In spite of it all, PF is and was a positively unique and wonderful band, able to capture so much of the cultural pulse of the times through out its very long and brilliant history.

Art attack (February 7, 2010)

This record is an astonishing document of that suspended moment in time, just before rock's Great Divide in the mid-1970s, when a punk and New Wave underground would begin to render acts like Pink Floyd perpetually unhip, and all the more so when albums like Dark Side of the Moon would find a grotesque level of commercial success and be warmly embraced by the Dazed and Confused set. This would shortly be my stoner older brother's music, played on eight-track tapes in his orange hippie van, and, for years, I wouldn't be caught dead hearing it. But, take yourself back to the time this was first released, and for a brief, shining moment, prog rock, glam rock, art rock, bubblegum pop could all stand side-by-side. Look at this cover art and listen to this music. The vibe is actually uncannily similar to the early solo work of Brian Eno, but there are also pop songs interspersed here that wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Todd Rundgren album. And, for a record by a band that was about to become a commercial behemoth, this is very heady, art stuff, without a whiff of sell-out about it. Impressive musicianship with admirable integrity, and it only loses a star for the utter lack of irony that seemed to have plagued most of Pink Floyd in its post-Syd Barrett phase. Barrett is a post-punk hero because he was funny and clearly having a lark overturning the rock-and-roll furniture, while Waters and Gilmour were a little prone to take it all a bit seriously. By the time of The Wall, they would be almost insufferably self-important. But that doesn't detract from the timeless beauty of the music they created here.

classic (August 12, 2009)

Here we have Pink Floyd saying goodbye to cult band status, about to go to the Dark Side of........well, you know.

Obscured By Clouds is a soundtrack, the last album they made before becoming rock royality in 1973. They already did two other film scores-More and Zabriski Point- but this is the most fully realized, prepared for a movie called The Valley.

The disc starts with "When You Are In,' a guitar blaze, which kicks in when Nick Mason cracks his solid drum fill. There is a beatiful organ piece, and some wonderfully organic folk songs, such as "Childhoods End."

Speaking of ends, this soundtrack is far more song oritented than the avant gaurd jamming and suites they were making up to Meddle. Floyd streamlines their sound here.

But not in the way Dark Side Of The Moon is streemlined. That album is a model of slick 1970s studio production and mature progrssive rock. Obscured by Clouds still has accustic folk and soundscapes that work as songs, not just bridges between songs, which Floyd was about to do on Dark Side.

This album really is an ending: Pink Floyd becoming a progressive rock powerhouse and not a experimental art band.

It is Pink Floyd waving the 60s goodbye.

Why I love Pink Floyd! (May 4, 2009)

This album is essential. "Stay" is by far one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs ever. Rick Wright and David Gilmour really shine and their voices and instuments blend in really well together to make this a more than a spectacular album. This album along with "More" and "Atom Heart Mother" are the most underrated Floyd albums and are my personal favorites.
I collect prog rock from the late 60's and 70's and this album ranks with the best of them.

Comfort and Roots burried, moving on. (March 29, 2009)

This is the foundation of a new generation. Pink Floyd is a rhythmically based band, considering that their name is a derivative of two blues musicians. Since Floyd had relied so heavily upon Syd Barrett, rhythmically and lyrically, at some point they had to break away from that and create a new voice. In a way they do, and in a way they don't. In viewing albums after Syd Barrett's departure, one must remember the Floyd had to struggle to appease the masses of their fan base that had grown accustomed to their style with Syd Barrett, as a fore-front member, albums such as Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, the More soundtrack and Umma Gumma which Barrett hardly worked upon. So the lyrics may fall short, and the music may be suffering at this particular moment, but the band is still orchestrating the way it always has, whether the music accompanies, smoke, lights, or moving pictures. The important thing to realize is that this is a move into a different direction and that Pink Floyd is still innovating. It is like visiting a mortuary, as some of the sounds imitate what Barrett did vocally towards the end of this particular album, a mantra if you will of falsetto singing, but more melancholy. Gilmour is a replacement. He has to live in that position for the rest of time. He is more of a pop musician in approach, but was anything like this being done anywhere else in that decade quite like this, as far as pop was concerned? It is the hope of this review you find the answer to be a resounding no. It is pop music, and on another hand it isn't because by definition pop music is what is popular. Pink Floyd has always set itself apart, but has always been popular because of that.