CD reviews: Pink Floyd; Foo Fighters; Damien Rice
Half a century into their career, Pink Floyd are more interested in mythmaking than music-making. Their 15th and (self-professed) “final album”, The Endless River shot to No1on the UK charts, beating out the Foo Fighters and Taylor Swift.
The Endless River
Columbia
Half a century into their career, Pink Floyd are more interested in mythmaking than music-making. Their 15th and (self-professed) “final album”, The Endless River shot to No1on the UK charts, beating out the Foo Fighters and Taylor Swift. Have they gone out with a bang? No, unfortunately: The Endless River is more like a psychedelic whisper.
Casual fans of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here will recognise all of the classic Pink Floyd ingredients: meandering, melancholic, cerebral, ambient. But The Endless River has none of those albums’ zany eclecticism. In place of Dark Side’s gentle, groggy energy is a deadened ersatz version.
The band’s first album since 1994’s The Division Bell, The Endless River is a commemoration of keyboardist Rick Wright, who died of cancer in 2008. But it feels more like the band’s funeral dirge. What’s more, the material is from Division Bell outtakes. None of it is new.
The music sounds more like a movie soundtrack (or a car commercial) than songs from one of rock’s most legendary bands. The movement is sluggish and clichéd. Endless river indeed.
Sonic Highways
Roswell/RCA
