Floyd Nation – Inner Light Review

What good, if any, can come from re-recording one of the greatest albums of all time? Floyd Nation aim to figure this out with Inner Light, a reimagining of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Beyond covers, there lay a few originals and reimaginations of what could have been had Roger Waters and David Gilmour ironed out the alleged issues the Floyd Nation team finds with classics like Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Have a Cigar. What we can both rely on and be wary of is that Inner Light comes from a place of complete devotion to Pink Floyd. What makes the progressive rock band such a spectacle is not just the personnel but the personable approach to their writing and instrumental work. Every note tells a story when Pink Floyd is at their best, and the emotional weight of such weighty music history, stripped away whenever anyone tries to cover it, is hard to evolve from. Yet Floyd Nation finds a way on this bold and often enjoyable adaptation.  

What Inner Light and Floyd Nation manage to navigate around here is the erroneous belief that a cover band can instil the same magic as the original group. Everyone from Oasis to Electric Light Orchestra has received some strange copy of people who believe that traipsing out the hits in as note-perfect a form as possible is what an audience wants. But, as the greats often detail, an audience hardly knows what they want, or when they want it. An instrumental, that’s different. Shine on You Crazy Diamond Pt. 1 is identical to that of what we hear on Wish You Were Here, but the fact that Floyd Nation can play a note-for-note match-up of an all-time great instrumental is staggering. It’s in the change towards the end, with a slightly different tuning to the guitar, that’s where the thrills lie. Shine on You Crazy Diamond Pt. 2 – 5 relies on a softer instrumental sound. A bold choice, but it makes sense given the vocal difference between it and the original.  

Instrumentally, Inner Light takes a far more relaxed tone than the spirit of Wish You Were Here. Will Kaiser and the rest of the band, but particularly Kaiser, are sensational. He matches the tone, the empathy, and emotional range of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here but offers that little extra touch that makes it the band’s own. That much is shown across the covers – it takes more than a love of the source material to make all of this work. Kaiser and the band pull off the adaptation well enough, though the slightly higher octave means a few of the more meaningful lines are lost to a premature end. Where it may be somewhat baffling to rerecord and release Wish You Were Here with near note-for-note accuracy, it does make sense. How else is a cover band to sneak in their originals? Usually, this would be quite annoying. But fair play to Floyd Nation, they’re a great listen.  

If anything, Inner Light proves the timelessness of Pink Floyd’s work. These songs sound fresh when adapted to a modern studio and played in a manner that has slightly changed the tempo and tone to suit a new collection of singers. A loop and reversal for Shine Zero is a nice experiment, a simple idea put together well. That’s all it takes for a continuation of what Wish You Were Here can offer listeners. The same goes for Pale-Diamond Eyes, a neat instrumental jam that feels more like a continuation of the mood than a song that wants to be included as part of the Wish You Were Here experience. It fits in thematically, though it would hardly conjure Pink Floyd tones had it not been added to this release. Those flute sections linger in the mind more as Jethro Tull than anything else. Still, Floyd Nation has a successful, steady covers album on their hands with worthy originals tucked away at the end of Inner Light.