THE DIVISION BELL

The Pink Floyd story limped to a shuddering halt with this album. Really, the band had been on a downward spiral since their last truly classic album Animals; The Wall and The Final Cut, whilst they had their moments, were blighted by Roger Waters' utter control over the band's creative vision causing so much internal acrimony that they barely functioned as a cohesive unit, whilst A Momentary Lapse of Reason was notable more for the legal battle over the Floyd name than for any of its musical content.

Here, Pink Floyd deploy dated production values which went out of fashion a decade earlier (just listen to what they've done to Nick Mason's drums) and toss in generic Floydisms in a half-hearted attempt to recapture past glories. Gilmour's guitar solos are meandering and pointless, the soul influences thrown in here and there are a shameless attempt to remind listeners of the backing singing on Dark Side of the Moon, but when you strip aside all these embellishments at its heart this is a mediocre 80s AOR album recorded in 1994. In short, everyone involved in this project should have been capable of much better, but simply didn't deliver. Like Momentary Lapse, it's cargo cult Pink Floyd, tossing together all the surface elements of past albums in the hope that this would magically yield the Pink Floyd sound of old. It doesn't work.