The beating of the Pink Floyd horse continues, as do these Spotify playlists. At least they stopped putting them out. It was likely one of the few years where an anniversary package could not be peddled. 2021. What a time. For Pink Floyd purists, it means seeing their favourite tracks mashed together under a Canva cover art grift. Six tracks for Play is meaningless. It pieces together six songs under the theme. At least Chillout had a sense of what it wanted to do, calmer tracks from a band best known for their longevity over albums, rather than pieces you can pick apart and play in any order. Ragged bits and pieces make up Play, a thematically indifferent set which holds six songs used to grift fans.
People still listen to Pink Floyd and likely always will. The Wish You Were Here record does not get spun as much as it should but there it is, downstairs and waiting to kick the onslaught of mid-2000s indie rock off the system. So then what purpose does Play serve? It feels objectively useless. These are six fine Pink Floyd songs and their piecing together, orchestrated as it is under the banner of a legally defined “new release”, is nothing shy of rewriting their very messy history. No tracks featuring Roger Waters appear on this compilation. Is it David Gilmour attempting to rewrite his era of Pink Floyd as the finest? Or is it just a long-running hatred petty enough to get interns to piece together Spotify playlists and new EP art? What is clear is both Waters and Gilmour are united by their attempt to flog the Pink Floyd horse for all it is worth.
As is their right of course, but the likes of Chillout and Play are tough to swallow. It serves no purpose. All it does is piece together Gilmour-written tracks from The Division Bell and A Momentary Lapse in Reason. Placing What Do You Want From Me, its constant ask of the audience for some clarity in what must be done, is a tad ironic. Listeners want nothing less than six-track exploits from the post-Waters era. This is not to say the Gilmour-led works are bad, far from it and they still have the booming intensity expected of the legendary group. But the intent is poisonous. Nothing shy of a grift and the fans will know it all too well. Yet they are the ones lapping up rerelease after rerelease of the same album, remastered over and over until the differences are not susceptible to the human ear.
Plenty of listeners are going to pick out these tracks and stuff them into their playlists – but the use of this six-track EP is as perverse as it is useless. Who heads out to find Play? Its stock guitar image and metallic army font are so far removed from the flourishes and colourful covers of the glory days. Even in the absence of the original team, there must be better effort put into conserving the tracks which are peddled as though there is some connection through them. It is no secret how poor a time the post-Pink Floyd releases have been, the obsession with remastering and reworking these high points is a worrying stain on an otherwise exceptional legacy.
