Drawing together the few loose ends of Atom Heart Mother and finding the band as creatively interconnected as they’d been up to that point, 1971’s Meddle is the full representation of Pink Floyd’s most successful attempts at experimentation and compositional versatility. Sidestepping the heady if well-meaning scope and direction of its predecessor, Meddle found the members of Pink Floyd in a state of near-perfect creative cohesion that they would, in the album’s aftermath, begin to descend from to the point of Waters’ departure. The album’s six tracks provide a striking view of the band’s career crescendo up to that point, resulting in the borrowed components of those most successful musical directions of their past and a forward-thinking sense of discovery in its execution.

Up to the point of Meddle’s release, Pink Floyd’s music had expanded to include all manner of experimentation yet often lacked the uniformity to give the music a sense of equilibrium. That is, the variables for the complex equation of their music had been honed to exactness, now all the band members needed was to bring the components together and shape them into a solution. That solidarity is immediately and profoundly evident on the album’s opening track and one of the band’s most powerful arrangements, “One Of These Days.” With a variance of sound effects, clever double-tracked bass, and the trademark atmospheric chemistry of Wright, Meddle begins with a nearly six-minute instrumental declaration of auditory absolutism for Pink Floyd.

The song’s cyclical nature segues perfectly into the austere and subdued “A Pillow Of Winds” with Gilmour’s muted work on the acoustic and pedal steel guitars laying a kind of bare vulnerability in contrast to the daunting command of the song preceding it. Despite the distinction between both tracks, each carries the album’s overarching compositional tone of being less forced into the enclosure of its own music and more deliberately orchestrated to complement the album as a whole. The same common threading finds its way throughout the album’s entirety in such a way that might otherwise suggest accidental genius were it not for the fact that the band managed to repeat the concept to even greater effect over the next three releases.

With its inclusion of the Liverpool F.C.’s Kop chanting “You’ll Never Walk Alone” taken from a field recording, “Fearless” is a criminally overlooked work of songwriting mastery for Pink Floyd. Turning the full share of its six minutes into a deceptively innocuous anthem of sorts with Waters taking on acoustic guitar duty alongside Gilmour’s lead guitar and vocals, “Fearless” contains the instantly memorable open-tuning chord progression underscoring the characteristically hazy vocals and mid-tempo range. Combined with the well-placed chants as background, the song again capitalizes on the album’s commonality in tone with the band following the pull of the music’s narrative itself instead of arbitrarily forcing it to go in multiple directions.

Meddle’s anomaly “San Tropez” is so due to the fact that it’s the album’s only track not resulting from collaboration but is instead the sole creative work of Waters. Along with the ode-to-a-dog “Seamus,” “San Tropez” is an inherently odd track given the rest of the album’s more layered and progressive mood, yet both tracks bear the significance of digression in that they offer a brief and altogether entertaining reprieve from any one single creative direction and as a contrasting introduction to the antithesis of brevity and simplicity that is “Echoes.”

Spanning the entirety of Side Two, “Echoes” stands as a point of reference for Pink Floyd at their most creatively and successfully tenacious. Having previously explored the magnitude and scope of marathon-length compositions, “Echoes” offers a familiar framework in terms of its length and the band’s compositional tendencies toward improvisation. What sets the song and in effect the entirety of the album apart is that “Echoes” found the band trimming away the last few ineffectual remnants that had detracted from the overall effectiveness of those more experimentally-focused tracks prior to it. Though those tracks in particular exemplified the whole of the band’s enormous talents as individuals, none had yet fully captured the uninhibited focus and direction of “Echoes.”

Even with its multiple transitions and movements, “Echoes” is inherently seamless and devoid of the somewhat fragmented nature of the band’s previous lengthy excursions, most notably the title track to the album’s predecessor, Atom Heart Mother. It’s not to suggest that the lot of Pink Floyd’s more experimental efforts prior to “Echoes” were invariably flawed as a prime example of the same creative cohesion was seen even in the band’s genesis with “Interstellar Overdrive.” What “Echoes” suggests instead is that the band then three years removed from the departure of Barrett had finally found its own creative solidity fully outside the creative but certainly not emotional influence of their friend and former band mate.

Much of what allows “Echoes” to be the songs that it is can be found in the more subtle idiosyncrasies and “auditory accidents” that serve to complement the entirety of the album’s more unobtrusive mood. What’s even more impressive about the song is that its eventual final form came from multiple fragments of songs and a multitude of experiments with sound of which the most recognizable and aptly incorporated would be Wright’s distinct submarine “ping” serving as the song’s sort of ethereal metronome and also providing a clear if unintentional line of dissimilarity between itself and the more immediately accessible songs preceding it. From there the song deliberately follows the ease of the album, strangely holding to that pattern while expanding the sonic reach to nearly every possible extreme.

Meddle’s concluding track remains as daring a track today as it was upon the album’s release and perhaps even more so given the level of patience it must have demanded from its individual creators. Like many of their lengthier tracks, “Echoes” gives credence, though likely unintentional, to the architectural background of both Waters and Mason. Often misconceived as organized chaos, free-form improvisation demands a creative sense of autonomy, maturity, and instinct from those musicians hoping to capitalize on its most rewarding effects. From that perspective, as much as the song waivers between the convex and concave sound spectrum and the seemingly infinite chasm between them, “Echoes” is grounded to an absolutely structural foundation that, in the song’s execution, works to every successful end for the simple fact that it’s nearly impossible to decipher.

Meddle’s placement in Pink Floyd’s discography is especially important as the album works as a creative fulcrum between the band’s ambitious if fragmented musicianship in the wake of Barrett’s departure and the more progressive and topically despondent releases that would cement their legend in rock and roll’s history. Though the band would repeat the album’s sense of creative congruency to enormously successful ends, Meddle remains the band’s most singularly comfortable album both in terms of the disarmingly restrained mood of the music and of the members themselves in its implementation. It’s a characteristic that provides a clear distinction for the album and places it in a realm of near positivity for the band who interestingly enough would find even further depths to their music by exploring the antithesis.