From the second-ever Floyd album to the second-to-last one, we now turn our attention to 1994’s The Division Bell. This album and the next were written and mostly recorded together, the first to include Richard Wright as an official member of the Floyd since The Wall fifteen years earlier. Musically this has certainly helped them lock in, Bell sounds more like a Pink Floyd album than its immediate predecessor.

But there’s just one thing holding it back. Those of you that know me know I’m always drinking that respect women juice. But when it comes to this album’s primary lyricist, David Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson, decades his junior, I can firmly say that to my mind every shitty thing Beatles fans have said about Yoko is true about her. I do not like Samson. Not on a personality level, not on an artistic level (she writes smug literary novels), and sure as hell not on a musical level. And she’s all over this album, having contributed lyrics to seven of the album’s nine lyrical tracks (and of the remaining two, one was written by Gilmour about meeting her.)

In the interests of saying something more positive, this Album has two pretty neat things going on: the presence of humorist Douglas Adams, longtime friend and school chum of all of Pink Floyd, picked the title and played guitar briefly on the tour; and the Publius Enigma, an early ARG tied in with its release that remains unsolved to this day more than 30 years later.

Despite its lyrical problems, the chops are definitely there on this album. If it was an instrumental suite it would probably rank several spaces higher… but it simply isn’t. Despite my negative assessment of the lyrics, the biggest highlight of this album is its final song, “High Hopes”, a quietly devastated ballad that reflects on the band’s early days as Cambridge universitymates in a way that’s impossible to read as being intended as anything other than the final statement on Pink Floyd’s legacy, its bittersweet roster changes, and even its very existence. Not for nothing is High Hopes’s second-most famous interpretation by the Finnish metal band Nightwish, themselves known for their own emotionally-charged breakup with their signature voice.