Pink Floyd

The Best Of Pink Floyd

They weren't too Careful With That Axe, Eugene.

Review Score:

(4/10)
The most obvious problem with this retrospective set is made clear by the hack job done to this collection's namesake: 2 discs are just not enough to aptly represent the best of Pink Floyd. Echoes is a classic Pink Floyd song, but not the sliced and diced version presented here for people with short attention spans. On this collection it should have been called "Echo." Chopping it up was a bad compromise made in order to fit as much as possible onto two discs. But that's just the beginning of the problems this best of collection faces. There are some really glaring omissions from this so-called "Best of Pink Floyd" collection, like "A Saucerful of Secrets" and "Interstellar Overdrive." These are two of the band's best known compositions from their early days, and not including either of those immediately disqualifies this collection as being any kind of true "Best of Pink Floyd" collection. Also noticeably missing are "Careful with that Axe, Eugene" and "Cymbaline." These are all important songs from that era of the band and should have been included as well. Other tracks that belong here are "Fat Old Sun," "Free Four," "Welcome to the Machine," "Dogs," "Run Like Hell" "Your Possible Pasts," "The Final Cut" and "On The Turning Away."
What makes this even more annoying are that some of the tracks included simply don't belong. While it's sort of nice to have "When the Tigers Broke Free" available on CD, it's a pretty boring song which should never be included on any "Best of Pink Floyd" collection. It would have been better to include it as a bonus track on the remastered "Final Cut" record. And while I like "The Great Gig in the Sky" it's certainly not more important than "Careful with that Axe, Eugene," which could have been put in that place with the omission of the completely pointless segment of "Marooned" that precedes it. "Sorrow" is okay, but "On The Turning Away" is much better. "Hey You" is all right as well, but "Run Like Hell" would have been a more obvious choice for a best of collection. As for the Barrett numbers, "Jugband Blues" could have been dropped in favor of almost anything else by him, and all of them could have been replaced by the far better choice of "Interstellar Overdrive." "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is another rough cut that takes away from its true grandeur, although the chopping job is a lot better than the awful one done to it on the Great Song Dances recording. And since that one is still in print do we really need to have "Sheep" included again, especially when most fans would name "Dogs" as their favorite from the "Animals" record.
I think Pink Floyd should pull this mess from the shelves and try again, this time making it a three disc set selling at a two disc price. And next time let the fans pick the songs. I'm sure we could do a better job than they did. After all, how can they possibly agree on which songs to include when they can't even agree on which one is Pink?
Two "pings" out of five for the mere fact that it does have some good choices, while heavily lacking in others.

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