Pink Floyd – Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd Review 

A greatest hits compilation makes little sense for Pink Floyd. The scope of their songwriting and the instrumental overlap from track to track make selecting individual moments a difficult one. The Dark Side of the Moon is a medley stretch of real importance, siphoning off this song or that track to a playlist is very different to deciding on which is best set to represent the album on a label-approved release. Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd has some of the all-time best songs on it, but without the flow of the albums they’re from, it loses that little bit of magic. Not even in chronological order like Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks or Pulp’s Hits, two projects which showcase the only successful routes for a compilation album. Either piece together nearly seventy songs from the archives or play the hits in proper order and stick a new song on the end. Echoes does neither.  

Instead, Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd ends with Bike, possibly the worst part of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The political infighting of the band is clearly at play here. Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd should be lauded for getting both The Final Cut and A Momentary Lapse of Reason on the tracklist, but beyond that, they’re the wrong song choices and do little to showcase the history of Pink Floyd. Any compilation worth the time it takes to listen to can and should paint a picture of the band as a working unit, no matter how much struggle we now know about their time together. A two-and-a-half-hour album which pushes the peace between the original four members to its very limit. This song must feature, that song cannot, it means the best efforts of the label are going to fall well short. That’s the case for Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd.  

By definition, what Echoes and Pink Floyd define as the “best” goes against what a fan, say, would have in mind. Historical revisionism is applied here. Nobody is thinking any less of songs like Astronomy Domine or See Emily Play, both songs showcase the early, psychedelic years of the band before tapping into some of their best-ever songs. But the inclusion of songs post-The Wall will always be contentious, none more than The Fletcher Memorial Home from The Final Cut or Learning to Fly from A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Both songs serve as representations to frankly lesser projects, nice of them to be included on that basis of remembrance, but hardly feature in a conversation of Pink Floyd’s best works. It feels like the songs selected from The Wall, Wish You Were Here, and The Dark Side of the Moon are inevitable, but also a scattershot of what the label thinks a fan will want to hear.  

They’re right to include the likes of Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) and Hey You, though breaking up the flow with Echoes is a bizarre choice. High Hopes is thrown on the end as an example of what a David Gilmour-led version of Pink Floyd could do, but then there are better songs from The Division Bell that can be used. The same, too, for those projects which were reliant on Roger Waters’ writing, like The Final Cut. It’s ultimately a mess which serves nobody better than the full albums in Pink Floyd’s rich and varied discography. Representations of the right albums, often with the wrong songs, or just an “it’ll do” attitude which prevailed in the Pink Floyd camp before their discography sale to Sony. Compilations have ran their course of usefulness, but Echoes can barely claim to profile the band properly, or as well as their contemporaries were at the time.