THE DIVISION BELL

On surface, this album is stylistically very close to the 'old' Floyd from "Wish You Were Here" era, but something is missing here. First of all, there are no really meaningful lyrics. One of the strengths of old Floyd was 'the concept'. The music was great but it was only 50% of the success - lyrics did the rest. This time, it seems as if Gilmour wanted to do a lighter album without all that gloomy stuff but he hasn't succeeded well. The lyrics are well under the usual Floyd standard from the seventies. That's one thing.

Now, the music. As I said before, the band (especially Gilmour) was able to re-capture some of the magic of the old albums. There are some spacey instrumental passages, beautiful solos, nice melodies. But there is one problem that makes this album sub-par to their early stuff - all songs are more or less the same. The strength of "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish You Were Here" (besides lyrics but I mentioned that already) lied in frequent changes of mood. We had some mellow songs, but also some dark, edgy and aggressive stuff (Time, Money, Welcome to the Machine)...With this album, it's like listening to "Fearless" or "Us and them" for over an hour, over and over again. This album is like that - no real shifts in mood, and... it's too soft. For me it is really hard to sit through the entire 65 minutes long CD, because somewhere in the middle I get painfully bored... If I listen to each song separately, I'm able to enjoy them much more.

To sum up, although the music itself isn't that bad and for any other band the album would a pretty fair release, as for Floyd standards it is only an average album. It may satisfy some listeners, but those who really love their innovative and intelligent music from the seventies can be a bit disappointed.