All my worst fears have been realised. The Endless River isn’t really an album. Oh boy is it sad that this has been labelled as such and so many poor people are spending money on some sounds that resemble Pink Floyd.
I’ve spent much of the summer listening to the Frozen soundtrack. The first 10 tracks are proper songs, the remaining 20 or so are sections of music that sound a little like the songs, but are really just a few bars here and there from other bits of the film. Put The Division Bell ahead of The Endless River and that’s what you’d get as well. The proper album, then some off cut bars of music. The sad thing is you can tell what song from TDB half of these tracks come from. Even the “proper” song isn’t up to much.
So what is it, then? Not an album, certainly. 20 years ago I’d expect to find this stuff on a cassette in Europa Music in Stirling going for 50p. The only way I can describe it is “Sounds of Pink Floyd”. Say you wanted PF ambient music playing but not a proper album – say, when having people over – this is what you’d have. I imagine the Australian Pink Floyd Show will pipe this in before the start of their show, when people are finding their seats before the curtain rises.
I’m not disappointed. I was half expecting this and, honestly, it still ranks above The Final Painful Cut by Roger Waters (performed by Pink Floyd).