Pink Floyd

The Best Of Pink Floyd

Valiant effort

Review Score:

(8/10)
If you are new to Pink Floyd and want to dabble in their various phases, this is the perfect album for you: it presents their admirable career non-chronologically (which actually works rather well) and gives you some of their biggest hits, as well as some of their best album tracks. Not only that, we also get the previously-unreleased "Wall" era gem "When the Tigers Broke Free".
For the older fans, this album will either confuse or infuriate. If the stuff they added doesn't work you up, what they cut out will. The most glaring for me was no "Brain Damage"/"Eclipse" to close out the album: I'm glad Syd's material wasn't left out, but the enormous DSOTM enders should be closing this album as well. "Animals" is not well represented, which is hard to say considering it only has 5 songs. In my opinion, they should have tried to fit the masterpiece "Dogs" on this album instead, a much more fitting song from one of their more overlooked albums.
It's hard to cut out any Pink Floyd tracks in favor of others, but they really messed it up with nothing from "Atom Heart Mother". The material they included from "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" and the "Division Bell" is fine, but it's a shame that their earlier, more obscure materal was cut out. A more fitting best-of would have been a triple-disc set. This way, more material could be added, not to mention that that way "Echoes" and "Shine On" might be kept in their original lenghts. All in all, this is a solid overview of Pink Floyd's career, but it helps to have their studio albums as well, brilliant in their own right.

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