Pink Floyd

A Momentary Lapse Of Reason

By the Way, Which One's Pink?

Review Score:

(4/10)
Some people claim that there was no Pink Floyd after Roger Waters left. For others, there was no Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett went mad and "left" Floyd back in 1968. But in both cases, the others left behind went on using the Pink Floyd moniker and did quite well for themselves. When Waters blasted the Floyd following his departure as a "spent force creatively", the Gilmour camp riposted by stating that they would prefer to be judged by the next Pink Floyd album, which turned out to be "Momentary Lapse of Reason".

So let's judge, shall we?! First of all, this album, which was largely concocted by Gilmour and a team of session players (Wright and Mason hardly even play on it)could be considered a Gilmour solo album. Even the previous (and far superior) "Pink Floyd" album "The Final Cut", often considered a Roger Waters solo album, had more imput from other Floyds than this one does. But in fact Dave Gilmour's previous solo outing "About Face" is much better than this album. There is too much late '80s "atmospheric" synth gimmickry here, and not enough interesting tunes. Gilmour often makes it seem like his battles with Waters came from the clash of his musicality with Waters' interest in album concepts and lyrics, but there's little evidence of that musicality here - Gilmour did come up with great tunes on occaison (e.g. "Wish You Were Here" and "Comfortably Numb"), but there's nowhere near enough to carry a whole album here. "Learning to Fly" and "One Slip" are decent songs, while "On the Turning Away" and the instrumental "Terminal Frost" are quite good indeed. The rest is rather dull, in my opinion. At least Gilmour and co. were to do much better with the "Division Bell"

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