‘Ummagumma’: The punching bag of Pink Floyd’s catalogue
Any band that has been playing for a while usually has those few albums that tend not to resonate with fans. Even if they have gifted us with some of the finest rock and roll ever conceived, there are normally those handful of records that the musicians don’t want to talk about or those fans have rejected completely strictly for being different. But in the case of Pink Floyd, there isn’t any way around talking about Ummagumma without it getting heavy pushback from fans.
Then again, every member of the band was pretty lost the minute that Syd Barrett was let go. Any group that loses their leader is going to be in a state of free fall for a while, but even if they had started looking for some new sonic touches, hearing them loosen up on an avant-garde studio/live creation was the last thing that people wanted out of the band behind ‘See Emily Play.’
But it was clear Floyd was never going to sound that way ever again. They had spent years trying to run away from the space-rock tag, and now with two slabs of vinyl to work with for their studio creations, this would have been the first time people got to hear what made them tick. And once people had a listen, it was clear that most of them weren’t ready to take on this kind of insane leap yet.
While the band themselves have had mixed feelings about tunes like ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ most of the back half of this record deserves even more ire, especially Roger Waters making some of the most dissonant noise of his career. Despite Richard Wright and David Gilmour’s respective sides sounding okay, all of them lean more towards ambient pieces than anything people might want to relisten to when not stoned out of their minds.
If that’s the studio disc, though, the live disc may have been the most important thing that the band made up until that point. Not every bit of it is the cleanest recording of their live sound, but hearing them get more comfortable with a song like ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ and ‘Set the Controls for The Heart of the Sun’ was proof that they were still honing down what they could do in that setting.
And considering where the band would go later on Meddle, Ummagumma feels like a breeding ground for that kind of sound. A lot of the unlistenable sides of this record might not be all that easy to stomach, but anyone would need to have a few learning curves before they were ready to create something as moody as the breakdown of ‘Echoes’, where all of the music stops and gives way to those sounds that make you feel like you’ve been submerged underwater.
When it comes to the live disc, it’s still far from the greatest record they ever made, but considering that Live at Pompeii was the next concert people could hear in full, the band took the versions that appeared here and blew them up to mammoth proportions, featuring that iconic shot in the movie where Waters hits that gong in ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ or the sense of madness that comes out of ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene.’
So even though Ummagumma does deserve a little bit of its reputation for being the punching bag of Pink Floyd’s discography, it might be one of the most essential pieces of their discography. There are still many pieces that don’t work, and it can be looked at as a failed experiment all around, but when a record like Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here wouldn’t have been half as good if they hadn’t learned from what this record brought.
