A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON

"A momentary lapse of reason" is nothing more than David Gilmour's will to carry on with Pink Floyd after Waters' decision to leave the band during the 80's. It should be considered a transitional work, since it shows pretty clearly how the post-Roger line-up was "learning to fly", trying to find a new inner balance.

From a musical point of view the album unfortunately sounds way too much 80ish, even though a bunch of great artists were involved in the recording, I mean Tony Levin and Phil Manzanera, for instance. The album contains one GREAT song "On The Turning Away", a couple of good tracks "The Dogs of War", "Learning to Fly", "One Slip" and other weak moments like the quite useless numbers "A new Machine" and "Signs of Life". There's one track on this album that I'm really confused about: "Sorrow": since I don't feel that it would be fair to consider it absolutely rubbish, but surely it presents different problems: 1. it's too 80ish 2. it suffers from what I usually call the "Post- Comfortably Numb guitar solo illness", to be more accurate: the following Pink Floyd songs are all identical from a musical structural point of view : "Sorrow", "On The Turning Away", "Coming Back To Life", "Poles Apart".

In other words they start in a quiet mood they grow up until the final climax which is the guitar solo in the end: a sort of clichè since "Comfortably Numb" adopted this kind of musical construction.

So considered this, the track sounds like a deja vu.

I tend to consider "Sorrow" as one of the most overrated PF song ever...it's way too 80ish, even though the lyrics are not so bad in the end.

Only one GREAT track on the album cannot allow me to give this album three stars, so I'd like to recommend it only to Floyd fans, since it's not that good, and to be honest, if you're a newbie, this "Momentary lapse of reason" won't help you to get a real idea of what PF are all about....

My Rating is two stars.