In which Pink Floyd goes metal (at least a little). Released just a few months before Ummagumma, More was a definitive move away from the primarily psychedelic sound of the band’s first two albums. The band’s first venture into film soundtracking, More is the sound of a band purging the angst of what had undoubtedly been an unusually trying and even tragic beginning. The album was also the first to feature Gilmour as the sole lead vocalist — a characteristic that would not be repeated until nearly twenty years later with 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. While the psychedelic expositions of the band’s first two releases are still present here (see opener “Cirrus Minor” for example), they became more of a backdrop to the central melodies and hook-friendly compositions of songs like “The Nile Song” and “Ibiza Bar” — both of which are two of the heaviest songs Pink Floyd ever put to tape.

After the hallucinatory ease of opener “Cirrus Minor,” More quickly takes shape as the riff-centered album it is with “The Nile Song” and its unhinged cyclical chord progressions paired alongside those atypically abrasive vocal stylizations of Gilmour. Interestingly enough, the normally muted and husk-tinged vocals of the guitarist took on those howls and gravel-throated traits of the blues musicians who’d long been informing his instrumentations. This same trait is heard on the nearly as heavy sounding “Ibiza Bar” and its more straightforward blues-rock aesthetic. The stylizations of these two songs in particular are noteworthy for the likes of those bands, particularly those in America, of the mid- to late-1970s era of hard rock.

Much of More still contains the pastoral balladry that Waters utilized both for its disarming characteristics as well as the contrasts presented to the more visceral sounds being created. “Crying Song” is the album’s primary example of this kind of folk-infused psychedelia as Gilmour’s vocals float just above the surface of Wright’s vibraphone and Waters’ subdued bass line and Mason’s minimal use of the snare drum. The disparity between songs on More gives the album a similar sequence to A Momentary Lapse of Reason with regards to each track serving less as complement to the whole and more as wholly individual and separate compositions.

More or less an apt musical precursor to the isolated compositional structure of Ummagumma, More capitalizes on the experimentation of the band’s more psychedelic beginnings and the progressive experimentation and sound manipulation that would be fully realized in the band’s later material. Transitions are difficult for any band, especially one still seemingly mired in the recovery of losing what was likely its most creative mind. More’s tendency to parallel the rock and roll stylizations of Pink Floyd’s late-’60s contemporaries is obvious, yet in such a way that speaks to the band’s seemingly instinctive predisposition to never let the music stay grounded for too long.

The most impressive tracks on More are its six instrumentals. An abnormally large number of instrumentals even by Pink Floyd’s standards, each song demonstrates the incredible depth of the band’s multifaceted and virtually endless musical repertoire, whether in the Mason/Wright penned electric jazz “Up The Khyber” or the hypnotic drone of “Main Theme.” The eerie ambiance of “Quicksilver,” with its use of multi-layered soundscapes grounded by Wright’s characteristic keyboard accents, can be seen as an early indication of the band’s impending change in direction to the moody rhythmic pulses on The Dark Side Of The Moon.

An important note regarding More is that the album was Pink Floyd’s first to be entirely produced by the band itself. It’s reasonable to assume that having fully removed Barrett from the band and separated themselves from a potentially creatively constricting producer, the band members gravitated to the most extreme aspects of their individual desires as musicians. From a motivational perspective, it’s difficult to imagine the members wanting to continue on in their previous creative direction as it was one rooted almost exclusively to the psychedelic sensibilities of their newly former band mate and friend whose absence would eventually find its way into virtually every aspect of the band’s creative psyche.

More is especially remarkable in that it shows both the band’s tendency for experimentation and the avant-garde as well as Pink Floyd’s uncanny ability at marrying those sonic conceptualizations to catchy hooks and foundational melodies. The album also showcases the band’s improvisational propensities, with songs like “More Blues” betraying that sense of free-form and unhinged vulnerability the band would later develop on a grander scale both thematically and musically. More is a bit of a testament to precisely what it is that would definitively set Pink Floyd apart from virtually all other rock and roll bands, only instead of those intricate parts working in near perfect machination they are splayed out and separated into their individual parts. Even with those parts not yet working in synchronicity, the fact that More still works as well as it does is further proof of the incredible creative command of those musicians behind its creation.