Richard Wright
Broken China

Uncle Rick, the George Harrison of the Floyd, without a doubt the architect of the group's alluring sound in many important aspects, such as the more atmospheric and meditative ones, has been missed for more than fifteen years now. Gentle and lazy, amidst one wife and another boat trip, he managed to put together only two solo albums in his not long life, and this is the second of them, from the year 1996.

Not at all ambitious, quiet, perhaps slightly depressed, he had the fortune, in the nineties, to fall in love and then marry a woman dealing with serious depressive disorders, and this album completely describes the struggle, the successes, the defeats related to the illness.

The music flows at times with moderately techno rhythms, more often lethargic, ambient, always visionary and elegant, a trademark for a zero-virtuoso yet extremely musical figure like him. Half of the tracks are purely instrumental, electronics are very dominant, although the array of flesh-and-blood musicians, especially guitarists, is well present. The piano arrives with force only in the eighth track, halfway through the album, and unfortunately, it is certainly not the main instrument of the project.

Among a multitude of changing melodic/rhythmic landscapes, like the soundtrack of a dramatic or psychotic film, Rick's calm and subdued voice occasionally rises, though not very well-produced, approximate in some passages. The Floyd references are very much present, of course, those from the later period, without Roger Waters. In other words, the influence of David Gilmour's way of developing vocals is noticeable.

The songs seem to proceed in quiet desperation, interesting but not exactly memorable, until right at the last contribution, there you have the masterpiece. Just as it happens in that floydian “The Division Bell” of only a couple of years earlier, with the concluding “High Hopes” that surpasses in quality what was contained in the previous sixty minutes, “Breakthrough” clearly stands out from all that comes before, making the possession of this work plausible, almost indispensable.

Much is owed to the interpretation of the lyrics (by keyboardist and composer Anthony Moore) entrusted to the late Sinéad O'Connor. The Irish singer-songwriter, already depressed herself, seems to have been born to tackle these scores, these atmospheres, these texts. Her unparalleled, strongly evocative voice, vulnerable and tormented, proceeds to give, through the lyrics, a thread of hope to the affairs of such a sordid and cruel illness. And they are genuine chills down the spine, also because Rick is at the height of his sound wisdom, truly unique in his genre.