Oh, dear! Roger Waters was mistaken if he thought Pink Floyd would dwindle and die without him, but this album represents all that was wrong with the post-Waters Floyd. First there's 'Shine On, You Crazy Diamond', one of the more amiable soporific Floyd opuses, but their inability to hit the right pacing means it's hiccupping all over the shop here. The numbers from 'A Momentary Lapse Of Reason' are leaden and laden with morose sentimentality, and Floyd's heightened obsession with making the maximum possible impact meant the loss of subtlety and surprise (a bugbear of symphonic rock at the best of times): the songs, like the ecstatic crowd, just thunder on indelicately somewhere in the background. The mechanical 'Learning To Fly' is a clumsily overproduced tune trying to sound spacey. And what is the point of a song like 'The Dogs Of War'? The musically superior 'Us and Them', also featured here, had already made the same point some fifteen years earlier in a much more poetically succinct manner. Even the excellent 'One Of These Days' is messed up; it certainly packs a punch, but there's a dreadfully peppy, stylised 80's sound to it, and that's the problem with the whole album. Rock groups, ever fearful of being labelled as passé, sometimes do the silliest things when pandering to the fickle tastes of the zeitgeist. By that time, Prozac Floyd had descended to the visual dork level of a Howard Jones, with the session men sporting ridiculous mullets and straining out jazzed up sax and guitar versions of the tunes which made Floyd great, accompanied by David Gilmour's silly and irksome growling. The point of this album? Another buck in the billfold.
