THE FINAL CUT

After the final masterpiece in the Floyd canon, The Wall, there was really nowhere to go but down given the state of relationships in the group. They should have stopped with The Wall but decided to put forth one final release. That's the conventional wisdom but in fact The Final Cut is yet another great album from the mind of Roger Waters, and it is the last true Floyd album (what came after I could describe in all sorts of colorful language, but I'll be nice and simply say it has nothing to do with Pink Floyd.)

The Final Cut is often described as the outtakes from The Wall and it would seem to be true. But since The Wall is an utter masterpiece it is bound to produce some good outtakes. There are some great lyrics and nice moments here: The Post War Dream, Paranoid Eyes, Fletcher Memorial Home, The Final Cut, Two Suns..pretty respectable stuff. Dave's contributions here are considerably less but when he does play his solos are still perfect for the songs.

The downside here is Not Now John which is really down among the very lowest of Pink Floyd moments. Truly awful. And I get a bit tired of Roger's vocal style that began with this album and continued into Pros and Cons, where he continually goes back and forth between the quietest whisper and then BOOM the full volume back in your face, and then the whisper again. But that's a minor nitpick.

The Final Cut is a beautiful and personal document that still finds Waters capable of expressing with unbelievable effectiveness all that is haunting, stark, bleak, cold. And yet I feel great joy listening to these albums which are so efficient, melodic, and perfectly constructed. It is unfortunate what happened to the band after this record and I wonder what could have been. But from Piper through The Final Cut, this band put together a string of albums that few other groups can match and together they have a body of work that will be remembered long after they are gone from this Earth. Not many groups can say that.

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