THE ENDLESS RIVER

As a lover of instrumental music, The Endless River largely works for me. There's an elegance in music that needs no words to express itself. On the other hand, this collection is patchy. Being the last album, I suppose they decided to throw in the leftovers along with the more focused tracks.

On the plus side, you get many of the things that make Pink Floyd such a treat for the ears, and without being triggered by Roger's lyrics and histrionics, clever as they may be. So TER is a less edgy listen than the later Roger period, and a more sonorous one. However, they all pale next to Floyd's greatest albums.

Still, there's some atypical tracks, like Sum, where the instrumentation reminds me of Saucerful of Secrets, with Nick's tribal toms, Dave's echoey slide guitar and Rick's keyboard washes. Yet this is more melodic and cohesive, more listenable. The track then morphs into Skins, where Nick doubles down on the Afrobeats to a spacey background, sounding like a very simplified version of Crimson's B'Boom.

The album lowlight is the dull and bland Anisina, which is simply not a Floyd song, or shouldn't be. It's good that they tried something different, but if you took Mr Gilmour's contributions out, this track would be a nice backing track for Kenny G or Michael Bolton. Seriously.

Otherwise, there are so many familiar riffs, grooves and textures that I have the impression that the band were making up for lost time. That is, they finally got to play some of their favourite things the way they always wanted to play them ... without Roger's complaints, criticisms and moodiness. Or, alas, his creativity.

There are so many short ideas stitched together that perhaps the album is more like a suite than an album of different songs.

Three stars. If you have Pompeii, Meddle, DSOTM, WYWH and Animals, your collection won't be much enhanced by TER, aside from sentimental reasons.