Pink Floyd
Endless River

Okay, we know, the fateful Endless River by the Pink Floyd has been released. After digesting several listens, I'll share my impressions.

I'm not going to do a track by track review; I don't like this type of analysis where you are forced to say something about every piece, and, above all, it makes little sense to do so with a Floyd album! Necessary preamble: we are talking about an album assembled by seventy-year-olds, from outtakes from a (mediocre) album recorded twenty years earlier by fifty-year-olds. So, apart from miracles, no one expects masterpieces akin to the ’70s, do they? Listening instructions. It’s a Pink Floyd album, so you put on the first track and listen in religious calm/disturbance until the last. Listening to just one piece is not advisable. It's disconcerting in forming a judgment and I recognize it can provoke bouts of nausea. But Pink Floyd should be listened to this way. What kind of piece would Vera Lynn be if it wasn’t preceded by One of my Turns and followed by the pair Bring the Boys/Comfortably Numb? Let’s move to the positive aspects of the listening experience: it's obvious that I have a predilection for long instrumental suites rather than songs. For those, there are the Eagles :-) Our album, thank God, is almost exclusively instrumental. This spared us the danger of each piece of the album being presented in the classic verse-chorus-verse-final Gilmour solo format. In fact, an avoidable solo project of his. The album is instead composed of patterns (more or less successful), joined together like fragments of a single sound mosaic whose outcome, in the end, deserves the brand it bears. Despite being a distant echo from the full-band works (with Waters), significant keyboard sounds can be appreciated, more or less vintage, always evocative, suggestive, sometimes self-celebratory (the Floyd are that by definition, but this time, it's said to be, for Wright) and self-referential from the past, which is understood to be 24k gold (and after almost 50 years it makes sense). Good change of register, excellent bass-drum performance (we really couldn’t ask Mason for more), superb feeling at the end of the listen. If we must say it, it's the guitar that doesn't quite match the house's reputation, not very hypnotic, not very magnetic, not very sharp, too close to the melodic solos of On the Island. Wrapping up, the paradox of this album is that it throws the big brother (Division Bell, composed, indeed of “songs”, of which I save only three!) off the tower from whose production the “leftovers” originated, which, reworked, made up this work. Let’s move to the inevitable criticisms. To begin with, the cover. An image with the colors of souvenir stalls at shrines, didactic, easy, light-years away from the works of the sixth Floyd, Storm Thorgerson. Almost justifying the iconographic ugliness, it was immediately spread news that it is a creation by an eighteen-year-old Indian, presenting it almost as the group's good deed of the day. Why, I wonder, couldn't they choose an eighteen-year-old English, Indian, Moldovan... but up to the task? Another note: the production entrusted to Manzanera and Youth. Skipping the first one, from the second (producer of Orb and the beautiful work Metallic Spheres with a real Gilmour on guitar) I expected something more, let’s say a more third-millennium approach in choices, refreshed, a bit like the duo Eno/Lanois did with U2, revolutionizing their sound. Another deplorable and incomprehensible choice: excluding three well-done pieces from the official “base” album to include them only in the 5.1 box set for those who understand little about music as about high fidelity.

At the end of it all, the inevitable question arises: “was this album needed?” In my opinion, no. Being now dated jam sessions, instead of a standalone album, I would have packed it all in a nice box set (without too much fuss) made of live recordings from the band’s golden age, maybe accompanied by videos, of which there is much, much need (apart from Pompeii, we have nothing; instead, Led Zeppelin made more box sets than concerts).

In conclusion, Endless River is an album worth listening to, though keeping in mind the preamble and following the instructions above. In the music business, Pink Floyd is a luxury brand, and like any luxury product, it turns into gold even what doesn’t glitter. Even if made of badly plucked goose feathers, have you ever met anyone who says Moncler is ugly?