Pink Floyd

The Best Of Pink Floyd

Superb overview to Pink Floyd's history

Review Score:

(10/10)
Pink Floyd's retrospective Echoes was released in November of 2001. At first, I thought worthless but then after hearing that When the Tigers Broke Free was finally being issued on an album, I said what the hey. Echoes is not like many best ofs that go year to year which is what ex-member Roger Waters wanted, the songs go from one to the next like your average Floyd album which is how David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright and longtime co-producer/engineer James Guthrie saw it. Many fans and Floyd bashers, stop whining or go to listen to the regular albums(the Floyd fans) or your Britney Spears records(some one star reviewers who bash this record for no reason)! It was impossible to put a collection of Pink Floyd songs together that would please everyone. I think the non-chronological placing of these songs adds something new to the mix and the transitions between some of these songs create a mosaic of music just as these songs did on their original albums. My favorite is between Us and Them and Learning to Fly. Classics like Another Brick in the Wall(pt.2), Money, Us and Them, Arnold Layne, See Emily Play, Wish You Were Here, Comfortably Numb and Learning to Fly appear as does lost classics like The Fletcher Memorial Home, Jugband Blues, Sheep and Sorrow. Some of the songs were edited like Echoes is reduced to 16 and a half minutes like it was on the band's 1987 tour when they played it for three weeks. Shine on You Crazy Diamond is edited into one long suite with a bit of the guitar solo from Part 3 missing and some of Part 6's lap steel solo shaved off and the intro to Welcome to the Machine missing and of course parts 8 and 9 are cut. Marooned is reduced to two minutes to serve as a bridge between Hey You and Great Gig in the Sky. Also, High Hopes has some of the intro effects, the ending lap steel guitar solo and the final bell tolls edited. The reason many hardcore fans bought this, including myself was the inclusion of When the Tigers Broke Free which was not on an album until this collection's release in 2001(now it is on the reissued Final Cut album). Echoes did well when it was released debuting at #2 and selling over 3 million in the US alone(it was held off #1 by Britney Spears' Britney here in the States whilst in the UK Floyd outcharted Britney) reaffirming Pink Floyd's place in history as the most successful art rock band ever. Highly recommended!

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