The Endless River (2014)

The Endless River (2014)

It happens to the best of bands. For most groups, the death groan is an arduous process replete with near-embarrassing attempts to drain every last drop of dignity from an otherwise nearly untouchable career. For a few, the end reads much like the post-script to creative exhaustion, with the band giving a nod to their work without fully delving into what’s likely an already spent creative hive mind. For Pink Floyd, the end came by way of a very fragmented glance at the pathos that had defined their sound and, to a large degree, the reality of their personal lives as well.

Twenty years after what many assumed was the band’s unofficial farewell with 1994’s The Division Bell, Pink Floyd released last year’s The Endless River. Explicitly marketed as a swan song for Richard Wright, The Endless River is primarily an instrumental album pieced together from previously unreleased material largely composed by the founding member and keyboardist who passed away in 2008. Written and recorded during The Division Bell sessions, Wright’s material is immediately reminiscent of that album’s synth wash atmospherics with Gilmour adding in his blues descant right on cue. And that’s just the thing here. It’s a beautiful rendering of what made Wright such a veritable force in the band, but the music here is a formulaic response.

Gilmour’s outstanding effort in 1994 was largely due to his refocusing the band’s compositional framework as it had always been intended. That is, the music of Pink Floyd works best when there’s equitable instrumentation. Sure, there’s the solo flair and the justifiable moments of virtuosic prowess, but the band’s nearly matchless power has always derived from the musical solidarity they shared against the odds of their subject matter. I’m not so cynical as to assume that The Endless River was a release purely conjured up by the marketing savvy of Gilmour, and even if that were the endgame it’d be an exercise in petty hypocrisy to dismiss the album entirely.

From a thematic standpoint, the album’s source material is all too familiar. Another member lost. Another elegy. While much of that melancholy is lost in the New Age atmospheric yawn of the album, the familiarity of Wright’s keyboard matched alongside Gilmour’s characteristic guitar is an elegant reminder of just one of the many components that contributed to the group’s success. Perhaps it’s precisely the way a band like Pink Floyd needed to end, with a mournful if fragmented look at a career that had burdened itself with the same things to great success and equally as devastating losses.