THE FINAL CUT

The fact that Roger Waters is in control here is nothing new. The Wall and Animals in particular, enough of Wish Of You Were Here and lyrically and conceptually The Dark Side Of The Moon were largely the result of Roger Waters' vision. And that pretty much sums up Pink Floyd's best work. So, unless you're fantasising about an LSD-infused outer-body experience one night a Floyd show, or if you're a goddam hippie, I can only see the band themselves missing those early days. Madness, disillusionment, social critique and cynicism had been a significant, if not dominant, aspect of Pink Floyd's music and lyrics for ten years by the time The Final Cut was released. Without Roger Waters' vision and force, I don't think the band could have sustained, neither has it done well to sustain itself without Roger Waters since The Final Cut-and that includes solo projects left and right. Now, lets get something cleared up. This is not supposed to be an uplifting album! Why would that be someone's measure of critique? Not even Meddle or Atom Heart Mother are "uplifintg". In fact nothing since Syd Barret was; and that was hardly intentionally uplifting. Pink Floyd was founded on madness, if you ask me. Or at least a very sincere inclination towards the bizarre. But by 1983, they had sobered up by a long shot, and The Final Cut is a requiem (!) and the confessions of a man growing up without a father, in particular one lost in the Second World War, making him someone living the questioning of man's purpose, the place of war in a supposed conservative-rational society, and living life with a continuing consciousness of loss and absence. These are not just empty ideas to someone like Roger Waters, and The Final Cut is the ultimate testimony of how seriously these ideas can be considered musically and lyrically. There is no other work like it, and regardless of it's affiliations to the once conceived of triple album, The Wall, it must be thought of as its own work and in many ways as Pink Floyd's most coherent work. It is a concept album, and it is a concept that excludes much input from anyone else, de facto. I cannot mourn Rick Wright's absence; in fact his absence is marked quite extraordinarily by the sombre and vacant arrangements. The keyboards and pianos we do hear are strikingly well placed and melodically very well accomplished. The lyrics are definitely among Roger Waters' best. Nick Mason's input is amazing, if you ask me. So what if some songs have no drums for the first half. They enter like canon fire each time, and work miracles together with the bass in their force and drive. Gilmour's solos are great, even if they aren't super abundant or ten minutes long. And listnening to Gilmour's 1984 About Face should leave any Pink Floyd fan thankful for his abstension on contributing to the songwriting at this stage. Roger Waters has managed not to hold anything back on this record. It is masterfully engineered and is a statement on a personal, political and-as regards Pink Floyd in particular-historical level. It marks the end of Pink Floyd in more ways than just Roger Waters' departure and yet it is far more than a Roger Waters solo record, as the Pros and Cons document. I think being able to give in to this record means understanding Pink Floyd all the more, and it provides an incredible depth to Roger Waters' struggles and how these became the dominating force within the band and allowed for the creation of a dark and haunted record that does exactly what it sets out to do.