Pink Floyd – The Final Cut Review

As if it could not get any worse than The Wall. Tensions rose ever higher with The Final Cut and the departure of Roger Waters was inevitable. It can still be heard on this car crash of a final Waters-led album. His pragmatics and influence on the preceding album are still a numb proclamation of his champagne socialism and this is no better. Waters’ influence felt by the death of his father in the Second World War and the amplification of death in the Falklands War should have been ample material. Yet it fizzles out quite like The Wall did, crushed under the weight of its ideas and unable to mount a sincere charge as Animals did. The Post War Dream has died. Waters admits as much, and it may be the strongest part of this soppy record. War never changes, to nab a line from Ron Perlman. 

Leftover bits of The Wall paired with the band trying their hand at a seedy pocket of 1980s influence. It is an uncomfortable mixture of the worst Pink Floyd specifications. Long and winding songs with truth at their heart but laziness cutting into what could be triumphant takedowns of British culture. Their attempts were better suited on Wish You Were Here and Animals. Hopes of furthering their booming progressive rock aesthetic are lost and instead, the conventions of their best efforts are compounded. Pink Floyd verges on caricature here. When The Tigers Broke Free has the Garth Marenghi issue. No subtext. Clear and cutting pangs of fear in Waters’ voice as he channels a David Bowie-like tempo. Dead bodies line the floor and the “ordinary people” they once were are sentenced to mourn. The Final Cut is an unmanageable and self-serving slice of instrumental density. 

Waters sounds like he has no interest in the death of his father, just in how he can use it as a tool. The Final Cut comes across as disingenuous and confirms the trouble The Wall faced. Paranoid Eyes claws its way through those signs of personable material but makes little fuss. An aching piano-led song which leaves the rest of the album behind in its toothless observations. There are personable pieces to those with the patience of Waters. The Final Cut serves more as a solo effort without contribution from the rest of the unit. But the likes of The Fletcher Memorial Home and Southampton Dock are of no intense or passionate challenge. At least the latter has the formalities of heartbreak in the homeland, something Waters tries to spell out from track to track. 

But all he can do is lash out wildly into a void of his own making, trying to compartmentalise complex feelings into an album which, by the time he got to making it, was suffering from its vocalist having spent his freeing lyrical exercises elsewhere. Pink Floyd makes an album which feels more like a diversion from their best bits, an embarrassing attempt at moving themselves into a heartfelt experience on the same level as Simon and Garfunkel. The focus was never on their vocal work but on their intentions as instrumentalists. Waters demands a time of change and as such provides a disappointing bow out of the band with The Final Cut. It did end as a final piece of the puzzle for his work with the group and is a sour note in an otherwise creatively blossoming relationship.