A bright spot on the first of two David Gilmour-fronted Pink Floyd albums, Terminal Frost is a sign of his instrumental desire. With bassist and songwriter Roger Waters leaving in 1985, what was left of the band scurried around trying to find a suitable style. It was a rather easy follow-up to the lightweight and loose The Final Cut, but still a challenge. A Momentary Lapse of Reason was far from brilliant, and though the band would make up for it with The Division Bell, it was an avoidable dud start to a new era. Terminal Frost, one of the singles released as part of the album rollout, was used to test the waters of what a Gilmour-led Pink Floyd would sound like. Anybody who had thought it would be more than a guitar-heavy instrumental, which highlights his skill for the instrument more than anything else, would be disappointed. But then, there is a strikingly cool style to Terminal Frost.
Daunting is the word for Terminal Frost. A mood-making piece of work from Gilmour and the remnants of the group, as well as Supertramp member John Helliwell. Terminal Frost is a slice of a wider sound which Gilmour was intent on capturing. It’s unfortunate that it was released in the mid-1980s. The wake of pop music at the time has overwhelmed the core of the song, and despite strong instrumental work, it feels a bit too similar to the lighter rock of the time. Such was the problem for A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Prog and soft are opposite sides of the rock spectrum. Pillars when done right, but a complete collapse occurs when wrong. Repetition is what makes Terminal Frost a dud. It’s a nightmare to hear those repeated notes. The guitar riff echoed by Richard Wright is of little interest. Not because it sounds unlike Pink Floyd, but because it has that generic sway of instrumental work of the times. Television theme tune adjacent.
And yet it works well as an introduction to a new Pink Floyd. Wright’s return marks a connection to the older string of Pink Floyd hits. He had been fired by Waters during The Walll and his return is marked not by a permanent reunion with the band but as a session player. His style of performance is strong still, he was the core rhythm to the very best Pink Floyd songs. But here he has a chance to develop a sound adjacent to what he had once provided the group. He’s playing to prove his instrumental quality can still match that of the old Pink Floyd, and yet manages to keep up with this reinvented version of the band under Gilmour’s stewardship. That fine line is a welcome experience and gives the song its most interesting moments.
What doesn’t help is the electronic drums. Dated they may be, they do provide the crashing repetition needed to keep the instrumental blur together. Nick Mason is a strong performer and proves as much here, adapting, as Wright does, to this new direction. That first half of the song is an uplifting and well-layered experience where the electric drum is dropped into the backdrop, the saxophone is brought into the foreground. This feels, in isolation from the rest of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, a chance to experiment with a sound away from reflections on war and fear. Waters had two albums worth of that with The Wall and The Final Cut. This is Pink Floyd taking a lighter step, and it works to a degree. Certainly not as strong as the releases to come before it, but some solid instrumental work.
