THE ENDLESS RIVER

NO no no... Pink Floyd plays ambient....urgh! Back in 1983 David Gilmour, during his terrible conflict with Roger Waters, said about The Final Cut "if the songs that were rejected from The Wall weren't so good, why should we publish them now as this new album?" Well, David: that's exactly what you've been doing with The Endless River in 2014. Why put out an incredibly bland collection of rejected tracks and instrumental pieces from the Division Bell released in 1994? as a hardcore Pink Floyd fan I couldn't tell you the dissapointment this record has been. This was the first mistep in Gilmour's later years management of PF catalog, from this album on it's been all about incredibly expensive box sets and cash grabbing releases. Needless to say it sold incredibly well. Conceptually this record goes nowhere, it's almost completely instrumental, quite often the band indulges in pandering with little eye winks to the audience (for instance the terrible arpeggiatos during Anisina that recall very strongly the strings arrangement on Comfortably Numb, for f.... sake!) Endless river is quite useless in making new generation approach Floyd's music, most of it is just boring elevator music at best. The only sung track is the closer "Louder than Words", an uninspired poppy mellow song. No adding female choirs, just to remind us of how GREAT Dark side of the moon is, is simply not enough. I found distasteful that the band, as in 2014 when this was record was being put out, claimed that this mess should have been considered a tribute to the late great Richard Wright, sadly gone in 2008. No guys, digging out of the vaults "Autumn 68" doesn't cut it for me as a tribute to this great musician. As far as I'm concerned this stuff should have been released on an extra disc along with the good Division Bell 20th anniversary box set released in 2014, since the material is really weak in order to be considered a coherent album. There's no really need to listen to Marooned left overs ( "It's what we do"), nor to listen to bits 1 minutes long like "Ebb and Flow" that really bring nothing new to the table and it's frightenfully ambient - oriented. In the end this record will leave you almost nothing, no memorable tracks, no great tunes.

I have deep respect for this band and their music has been a HUGE part of my life, but this record is a really weak, uninspired collection of jam sessions, ambient tracks, boring leftovers from a really good record (The Division Bell) and it's something only die hard fans and completists should have in their collection.