THE FINAL CUT

Roger Waters last hurrah under the old moniker, and a rather difficult one to absorb. The Final Cut tends to separate fans into clear 'love' and 'love-not' camps - there is rarely a middle ground. The style that began to develop on The Wall would flourish here: generally intimate, with Roger's anguished vocal and wordy lyrics very dominant amidst very sparse acoustic based arrangements with generally quite short bursts of excellent classic band-generated passages, the musical highlights being a couple of stunning solos from Gilmour and some divine sax.

Gilmour's guitar sounds wonderful as always as in Your Possible Pasts, but much of the album passes slowly with just Roger and his bile-ridden tirades and world-weariness singing over simple backing. If lyrics are not your scene, then this will not be the album for you. The pervading atmosphere is one of sadness, loss, regret and pent-up anger at senseless waste of human lives. Very laudable, but perhaps Roger ought to have paid a little more attention to the sound he was making.