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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Final Cut...The Last Straw for David Gilmour, May 11, 2002
This often brilliant but flawed album is the nearest thing to a Roger Waters solo album in the Pink Floyd catalog, much as "Momentary Lapse of Reason" would be the nearest thing to a David Gilmour solo album in said catalog. Keyboardist Rick Wright, responsible for the lush keyboard textures that helped characterize Pink Floyd's sound up to 1977's "Animals", had been forced out of the group three years earlier. Drummer Nick Mason's creative involvement had declined sharply since "Dark Side of the Moon", and guitarist David Gilmour, who had co-written such classics from the previous Pink Floyd album, "The Wall" as "Young Lust", "Run Like Hell", and "Comfortably Numb", got no writing credits in edgewise this time, was ousted from the production team, and was reduced along with Mason to the status of sideman alongside a bevy of session players, one of whom even replaced Nick Mason on drums on one of the songs. "The Final Cut" was the culmination of a trend that started with "Dark Side of the Moon", the first Pink Floyd concept album with all lyrics by Waters, in which all tracks segued into the next and leitmotifs, especially in the form of sound effects, were used to reinforce the album "concept". Since it worked so well, it seemed the right idea to keep doing it for future albums. But with every subsequent album Waters' concepts and lyrics became more personal and he, understandably, wanted greater control over the album projects, and arguably came to see them as "his" rather than the group's. "The Wall" however was a commercial success despite this tendency. Co-producer Bob Ezrin's imput helped make a narrative that was very personal to Roger Waters a more universal statement about authoritarianism, alienation and isolation. The concept behind "The Final Cut", subtitled "a requiem to the post-war dream", was not as universally accessible- since it was about the death of Waters' father in World War II and his belief that the dream of a better world, that had motivated men like his father to fight to their deaths in that war, had been betrayed, and that the final betrayal ( "the final cut") was being dealt by world leaders like Britain's own Margaret Thatcher. You have to have a certain understanding, and more than that, a certain interpretation, of history in order to appreciate the concept behind this album. Also, the music here doesn't sound much like the "classic" Pink Floyd sound- throbbing keyboards, soaring guitars, and so on. That doesn't mean it's bad, it's just different. Some songs here have a folk-rock sound ("Your Possible Pasts", "Two Suns in the Sunset"); others have a piano and orchestra backing ("The Gunner's Dream"; "Get Your Filthy Hands off My Desert"; "Fletcher Memorial Home", "The Final Cut"); and others combine the two styles in the same song ("Paranoid Eyes", "Southampton Dock") I like both of these styles myself, although some of the bits meant to move the narrative along are a bit weak musically- including "Paranoid Eyes", which is redeemed mainly by the organ solo in the middle, and particularly "The Post War Dream" , which sounds like it could have been done a lot better, and is not helped by a disgruntled Gilmour's guitar playing- he evidently didn't care for that song at all. For whatever reason, "The Final Cut" was a relative commercial failure- compared not only to "The Wall", but even compared to Gilmour-driven Pink Floyd releases "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" and "The Division Bell". The closest we get to hearing "old" Pink Floyd music is when Gilmour plays one of his solos, or during "Not Now John" (a bluesy number reminiscent of "Money" and "Have a Cigar", and on which Gilmour sings all but the final verse). The last song, "Two Suns in the Sunset" is an ostensibly jaunty tune with lyrics which deal with a sudden death on the highway due to the "second sun" being a nuclear explosion..."The Fletcher Memorial Home" (Roger's father was Eric Fletcher Waters) imagines taking world leaders who make such a holocaust more likely with their bloody military adventurism, to the "Fletcher Memorial Home", and then, after a discreet interval, applying a "final solution" to the lot of them. An understandable thought, but it grates somewhat with me, since I find the idea of "final solutions" inherently creepy, to say the last, and anyway we're all ultimately responsible for what we allow (and often encourage) these leaders to do, as Waters himself suggests when he sings that "When the fight (World War Two) was over, we spent what they had made" (we wasted their sacrifice.) The main fault, apart from the ones I've already described, is Waters' singing, which is hard to take, especially during the title track. Not for those who like their listening easy.
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