Obscured by Clouds is the soundtrack to the Barbet Schroeder film La Vallée, and it plays that way. Of course, it's possible to make the argument that
Pink Floyd's music of the early '70s usually played as mood music, similar to film music, but it had structure and a progression. Here, the instrumentals float pleasantly, filled with interesting textures, yet they never seem to have much of a purpose. Often, they seem quite tied to their time, either in their spaciness or in the pastoral folkiness, two qualities that are better brought out on the full-fledged songs interspersed throughout the record. Typified by "Burning Bridges" and "Wot's...uh the Deal," these songs explore some of the same musical ground as those on
Atom Heart Mother and
Meddle, yet they are more concise and have a stronger structure. But the real noteworthy numbers are the surprisingly heavy blues-rocker "The Gold It's in The...," which, as good as it is, is trumped by the stately, ominous "Childhood's End" and the jaunty pop tune "Free Four," two songs whose obsessions with life, death, and the past clearly point toward
Dark Side of the Moon. ("Childhood's End" also suggests
Dark Side in its tone and arrangement.) As startlingly advanced as these last two songs are, they're not enough to push the rest of
Obscured by Clouds past seeming just like a soundtrack, yet these tunes, blended with the sensibility of
Meddle, suggest what
Pink Floyd was about to develop into. [
Obscured by Clouds was re-released on CD in 2016.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine