Hi everyone, welcome back to my series about Pink Floyd’s albums.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason was the first of the three Floyd albums to be cut following Roger Waters’s acrimonious 1985 exit from the band and it’s by far the best because David Gilmour had not yet met Polly Samson at the time it was written and she could not shit all over the album with her horrible lyrics. I would go so far as to say I actually even kind of like this one. It’s very different from the albums that came before it, it has that synthy, polished mid-80s middlebrow rock sound that’s a little bit late prog rock, a little bit matured New Wave. Maybe that’s more mainstream than Pink Floyd “should” be, but I still find it broadly enjoyable despite that. If you like Phil Collins-era Genesis you will probably like aMLoR.
Interestingly, this album also marks Richard Wright’s return to the band after being unceremoniously fired late in the production of The Wall. Like on the tour for The Wall, he was not an official member of the band, however, and was credited and paid as a freelancer. His official rejoining only came during the sessions that produced The Division Bell and the Endless River.
The best song on the album is definitely its final track, “Sorrow”, a , which leads off with a thunderous guitar intro recorded in an empty Los Angeles Memorial Sports arena before turning into a haunted, apocalyptic vision of isolation. Gilmour says he originally wrote it as a poem and only later wrote to music, and correctly attributes it as one of his single strongest lyrical efforts.
Other great tracks on the album include its lead single “Learning to Fly” (written, indeed, about the experience of Gilmour getting his pilot’s license) and its B-side “One Slip”, and the ballad “On the Turning Away” which despite somewhat schmaltzy lyrics manages to feel suitably anthemic. If there’s a word that describes this album it’s “anthemic”, every song is going *very* big, whether it makes sense to or not.
