Pink Floyd - The Endless River
On November 7, 2014, "The Endless River", the fifteenth and final studio album by "Pink Floyd", was released.
Some albums are born out of a drive to reach new heights, and some are born out of longing, gratitude and the deep need to say goodbye. When keyboardist and founder Richard Wright passed away in September 2008 after a quiet battle with cancer, it seemed that "Pink Floyd"'s chapter in musical history had been finally closed. For four decades, Wright had been the band's quiet glue and harmonic heart, the man whose synth layers, Hammond organ sounds and impressionistic piano gave David Gilmour's guitar the space in which it could soar. His death left a void that could not be filled, but also a vast archive of material that had patiently waited for the right moment to come to light.
The roots of "The Endless River" go back to January 1993, when Gilmour, Wright and drummer Nick Mason gathered at Britannia Row Studios in London and later on the Astoria studio ship docked on the River Thames, along with producer Bob Ezrin and sound engineer Andy Jackson. The goal was to start from scratch and relieve the tension that had accompanied the previous years through whole days of free and pressure-free improvisation. The three friends simply played together for long hours, recording over twenty hours of mesmerizing instrumental dialogues, and from half of this material grew the album "The Division Bell" released in 1994. The other half, codenamed "The Big Spliff" in the studio for its ambient, floating and psychedelic nature, remained archived for twenty years.
In 2012, four years after Wright's passing, Gilmour and Mason decided to reopen the old tape boxes. They enlisted the help of producer and bassist Martin Glover, better known as Youth from the band Killing Joke, guitarist and producer Phil Manzanera from the band Roxy Music, and their longtime collaborator Andrew Jackson. Rather than presenting an archival collection of unfinished sketches, Gilmour and Mason chose to treat Wright's recordings as living elements and build a complete, cohesive 21st-century work around them. The pair entered the studio to record new guitar, bass, and drum parts, layered modern sounds, and assembled the tracks into four continuous suites that resembled the four sides of a double vinyl record, a single continuous musical flow connecting the past and the present.
Side one opens with the track "Things Left Unsaid", a name that says it all about the feeling of missing out and the things that are left hanging in the air between the band members. The track opens with old voice samples of Wright, Gilmour and Mason from past interviews, against a backdrop of warm synth layers and the sound of Gilmour's floating EBow guitar. From there, the album flows naturally into "It's What We Do", a six-minute track that instantly transports the listener back to the golden age of the 1970s. Wright's Hammond organ and synthesizers sketch an atmosphere that immediately recalls the opening of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and the spaces of "Welcome to the Machine", while Gilmour launches into a slow, bluesy and rocking guitar solo that rests on Mason's precise and restrained drumming, before the side closes with the minimalist and poetic track "Ebb and Flow".
The second side picks up the tempo and opens with "Sum", a track on which all three band members share a co-writing credit. Wright's Farfisa organ and Gilmour's VCS3 synthesizer create a growing psychedelic tension reminiscent of the band's early 1970s days, and erupt into a cutting electric guitar riff. It's immediately followed by "Skins", a tribal and hypnotic drum show where Mason takes center stage with rototome passages and a powerful gong, a clear homage to early works like "A Saucerful of Secrets". After a brief interlude on "Unsung", comes one of the album's most moving gems, "Anisina", whose name means "in memory" in Turkish. It's an instrumental ballad written by Gilmour on piano, featuring Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon on a soulful tenor saxophone and clarinet solo, similar to the classic saxophone role on "Us and Them," before Gilmour closes the piece with a soaring guitar solo.
Side three presents a series of seven short sections that merge into one another like a nocturnal stream of consciousness. It opens with Wright's brooding piano on "The Lost Art of Conversation" and continues into the smoky, urban groove of "On Noodle Street", joined by veteran bassist Guy Pratt and keyboardist Jon Carin. After the dreamy atmosphere of "Night Light", the album surprises with the hedonistic, fast-paced pace of "Allons-y (1)", built around a sweeping guitar riff that recalls the dynamics of "Run Like Hell" from the album "The Wall". Right at the center of this section is a chilling historical moment as it transitions into "Autumn '68", a rare 1969 recording of Wright playing the massive pipe organ of London's Royal Albert Hall during a sound check, just months after the release of "A Saucerful of Secrets." The churchy, regal sound of 1968 merges directly into the second part, "Allons-y (2)", and from there into "Talkin' Hawkin'", where the electronic voice of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking returns, first appearing in the song "Keep Talking" twenty years earlier.
The fourth and final side opens with a dark and mysterious atmosphere with "Calling", written by Gilmour with Anthony Moore and incorporating samples of metallic percussion and deep bells. The section "Eyes to Pearls" leads into the bright optimism of "Surfacing", where the familiar bell sounds of "High Hopes" return as a symbolic bridge between the song that closed "The Division Bell" and the only song on "The Endless River" with lyrics and vocals, "Louder Than Words". The lyrics were written by writer Polly Samson, Gilmour's wife, after watching from the sidelines as the four band members rehearsed for their historic "Live 8" reunion show in 2005. Samson noticed that despite the precipitation, arguments and long silences in the room, once the music started playing, the telepathic connection between them surpassed any words ever spoken.
"Louder Than Words" reunites Wright's electric piano, Mason's drums, Gilmour's vocals and guitar for the last time, along with the electronic string quartet "Escala" and backing vocals from Durga McBroom, Louise Clare Marshall and Sarah Brown. The album's visual artwork, inspired by digital art by young Egyptian artist Ahmed Emad Eldin and developed by Aubrey Powell of legendary design studio Hipgnosis after Storm Thorgerson's death in 2013, also captures the spirit of farewell, with the image of a young man rowing a boat across a sea of clouds towards the setting sun. The album's name itself is taken from the final line of the song "High Hopes," in which the endless river flows forever, and that's exactly how the entire album functions, not as an attempt to recreate the peaks of the past, but as a final, peaceful, and gracious love letter to Richard Wright and the shared journey of one of the greatest bands in human history.
You can watch the official animated film for "The Endless River" directed by Ian Emes, providing a mesmerizing visual accompaniment to the sounds of the band's farewell album.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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