THE FINAL CUT

Two stars. And only because David is my king! I will never really forgive Roger Waters in my mind, for what he did in the latter years of Pink Floyd. I know I don't have any real right to feel like Waters has caused me any personal grievance, but I don't care.

Even "The Wall" looked a lot like a Waters solo-project, the only major contributions that aren't his come from Gilmour in the forms of "Comfortably Numb" and "Run Like Hell" (in my opinion two of the albums heights). Although that's all ok, the record turned out well and is a good bit of music, so I don't knock him too hard for that. But effectively hi-jacking the band with the use of his central/pivotal role, and threatening not to release "The Wall" unless Rick Wright left the band? Of course no one really knew anything about this until Wright's name was mysteriously absent from any credits when "The Final Cut" was released.

And lets be perfectly honest here, what we are given is the dreary musical off-cuts of a man who now both dangerously depressed and obsessed with the old wars and daemons of his family's past.

But apparently there is some ok music on here, despite the awful terms in which it was cut out. And I do like "The Fletcher Memorial Home", because I love the elegance of David Gilmour's technique on the guitar. And those two reasons combined, are the only grounds for this getting more than one star. But by this time I'm starting to realize that my talk is awfully simplistic and childish, for it must be possible to like this album, and glancing through the reviews, some people indeed do. One collaborator called it an "aqquired taste", which is probably totally fair and true, a lot more than I can say for my own comments. But I find it impossible to imagine, that this could ever live up to anything the band put out during the 1970's. The band is falling apart, the fighting within has utterly decimated an amazing unit of creativity, and to me it all seems so hypocritical and ironic that Waters has become so much of what he detested. All this, just prevents me from ever getting into "The Final Cut" at all.

To put it in another perspective, I own "Piper", "Saucerful", "Ummagumma", "Atom Heart", "Meddle", "DSOTM", "WYWH", "Animals", "The Wall", "Momentary Lapse" and "Division" (plus the assortment of usual Floyd compilations). But "The Final Cut" is nowhere to be seen on my shelves. And I haven't got anything more to say, scathing and harsh I know, but honesty and opinion can get brutal.

Regards, Chris Holdaway January 2007 Berlin, Germany