Pink Floyd: The Division Bell

PINK FLOYD: THE DIVISION BELL (1994)

General verdict: A tired, derivative, and washed-out nostalgic prayer thatʼs as honest and sympathetic as the finest in tired, derivative, washed-out nostalgic prayers go.

Critically slammed upon release with just as much verbal venom as A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, it might look like The Division Bell is one more of those albums in desperate need of a fair reassessment — especially in this new era when Angry Artistic Assholes such as John Lennon or Roger Waters are starting to (at least temporarily) lose the battle to Pleasant Polite Personalities such as Paul McCartney or Rick Wright (Gilmour, I guess, sits somewhere in the middle between these two, though still probably closer to PPP than to AAA). So far, however, I have not seen much activism on the matter; and the main reason, I think, is that The Division Bell simply holds no appeal whatsoever to the younger generations — of all nominally Floyd albums, this one is the most openly «boomer-oriented» of the lot, meaning it would be totally uncool, at best, to defend it around 2020.

Roughly speaking, The Division Bell in its entirety is one long, juicy, self-absorbed nostalgic trip. Recycled musical ideas with slight variations; lyrics almost completely centered on past memories and experiences; guitar solos that weave a near-constant fabric of light nostalgic melancholy — everything here screams, one way or another, that the course has been run and that this bandʼs best days are long, long gone. But at least there is a hint of honesty about it, one that was missing on Momentary Lapse Of Reason, an album whose production values, moments of puffed-up anger and occasional stabs at social relevance gave the illusion of a band ready to move forward with the times. On The Division Bell, Gilmour and Wright are busy doing what they actually want to do and what they can do, freeing themselves from the social obligation to prove that Pink Floyd can continue to be a progressive force even without Waters. If what they want to do is simply shed a tear about how "the grass was greener", we have every right to empathize with that tear.

Except you have to wait a long, long, long time to get around to ʽHigh Hopesʼ, arguably the albumʼs culmination. Before that, you have to sit through ʽCluster Oneʼ, a nice and forgettable instrumental in the vein of ʽShine Onʼ, but with no memorable guitar lines; ʽWhat Do You Want From Meʼ, the albumʼs most energetically aggressive blues-rocker in the vein of ʽHave A Cigarʼ, but without that songʼs bitter sense of sarcastic humour; ʽPoles Apartʼ, seven minutes of pleasant folk rock with a «psychedelic» interlude in the shape of a carousel waltz; ʽMaroonedʼ, another instrumental excuse for an extended Gilmour solo that could have been taken right from the outtakes of his first solo album; ʽA Great Day For Freedomʼ, an ironic anthem whose musical pomp makes it sound like a special coda for The Wall directly commissioned from the likes of Asia (Gilmour even sounds a bit like John Wetton here); ʽWearing The Inside Outʼ, a bona fide adult contemporary number sung by Rick Wright but featuring no interesting keyboard work from him whatsoever; ʽTake It Backʼ, a very strange attempt by the band to go all utterly U2 on our asses — I mean, Gilmour did invent The Edgeʼs style of playing, but did he actually have to adapt it back, and try to sing like Bono at the same time?... and oh God no, there are still three more songs here before ʽHigh Hopesʼ, and I have already exceeded my limits on these mini-assessments.

Arguably the main weakness of all these songs is that they all go on for way too long, but thatʼs Pink Floyd to you: you know it donʼt work if it donʼt have an epic or atmospheric intro, and a solid Gilmour solo, and these things take time. But another weakness is the production — even if it is cleansed of the usual Eighties excesses, most of the album still sounds surprisingly lifeless, to the extent that even the live renditions of these tunes on Pulse are somewhat preferable to their studio counterparts. Gilmourʼs guitar tones are thin, and the melodicity is often lost in the dense forest of keyboard overdubs and echo effects. Even something as forgettable by itself as ʽComing Back To Lifeʼ actually does come back to life for a brief while during the live performance at Daveʼs Pompeii concert in 2016, with sharper and crisper guitar tones, louder and prouder vocals, and a band that seems way more willing to get into it than the session musicians were in 1994. It is almost as if Gilmour gave everybody a warning — "listen, guys, we are making this brooding melancholic album about how everything sucks, you are not allowed to bring any emotional sharpness or power into the proceedings".

ʽHigh Hopesʼ is a different story, though. It isnʼt nearly as killer as ʽSorrowʼ, simply because it delivers a smoother, compromising message — but it does feature the albumʼs most (if not only) memorable chorus, it does contain its most beautiful slide solo, and it does deliver its general message more efficiently in seven minutes than the rest of the album does in one hour. In the lyrical department, I admit that it can make one uneasy to sing along with lines like "the grass was greener, the light was brighter", even while fully grasping their irony — but one should not also overlook the titular line of "the ringing of the division bell had begun", which, in the context of the song, certainly referred to Sixtiesʼ counter-culture, but in these days could just as easily ring true with the social and generational rifts of the 21st century. I am not a big fan of the main piano-led melody — its chords are more post-peak Camel than Floyd in nature — but boy does David ever shine on that solo outro, maybe his best since ʽComfortably Numbʼ, though, once again, he does an even sharper and shriller job on subsequent live performances.

In any case, I think that at the very least, The Division Bell does good as a proper swan song for Floyd — who knows, maybe it would have earned a little more respect had Gilmour, Wright, and Mason expressly stated at the time that there would be no more Pink Floyd after this release, instead of leaving everybody hanging on in obscurity and letting things just go their natural way. It is definitely no Abbey Road, an album that managed to nicely sum up things while at the same way pointing several distinct paths to musical future; but neither is it an Itʼs Hard, an album that had to fake creativity and enthusiasm where there was none in sight. It is a record that honestly says it — we are tired and weary, we are through, we have no perspective on the future, we are only inspired by our past, and we are not ashamed of it. No wonder that the message was ignored or ridiculed back in 1994 — but as you look back on it from 2020, it is actually hard not to get some respect for this position.