Sometimes you love an album not just for itself, but for who and where and when you were when you first came to love it.

I feel very strongly that 1970’s Atom Heart Mother is the most underrated, underloved Pink Floyd album. Even the band don’t seem to like it much– David Gilmour once described it as “a load of rubbish” and Roger Waters has called it “a good candidate for chucking into the bin and never listening to again.” Not one track from it is on any best-of compilation and material from it was never performed live after 1971 (though on solo tours Gilmour has occasionally played his “Fat Old Sun.”)

But they’re wrong, goddammit, this one’s brilliant and hypnotic. I don’t know anymore if my 2007 road trip with my father and sister to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas was the first time I listened to it, but it was certainly when I fell deeply in love with it, sitting near the rim of the grand canyon and watching what I’m pretty sure was an actual California Condor lazily soar over the pit, almost in time with the “Western” theme that recurs throughout Side A’s “Atom Heart Mother” suite. That is a memory I will always treasure and a reason why I can’t do otherwise than love this album. You might think I’m crazy to put this over one of the big four. But it’s my list and I love the Chica that loves this album and she’s getting her way.

Like most albums from the wilderness years, it includes a lengthy collaborative suite on one side (whose working title “The Amazing Pudding”, inspired the name of a long-running Floyd fanzine), and on the other, tracks written individually by the four members. Former Floyd frontman Syd Barrett was in the studio around the same time working on a solo project, and unlike his awkward and unpleasant return five years later, which you heard about yesterday, it was fairly cordial; all five hung out together in between sessions. The title was taken from a newspaper headline about a woman with a then-novel nuclear pacemaker; the cover art, a photo of a Holstein cow, was chosen to be thoroughly mundane and not evoke any of the space imagery that they had become associated with in their early career.

Highlights include the expansive, experimental titular “Atom Heart Mother Suite”; Roger Waters’s contribution “If”, which is raw and vulnerable in a gentle, quiet way uncharacteristic of the acidic bassist; and “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”, a shorter instrumental suite (composed jointly by the band, but spearheaded by Mason and Waters) punctuated by the sounds of roadie Alan Syles cooking and discussing breakfast that closes out the album, on vinyl the final sound of a faucet dripping will repeat endlessly.