Pink Floyd - 'The Final Cut' (EMI) Released 29/03/04

When this album was first released, we'd just been involved in a war and were ruled by an unpopular Prime Minister.  What's new then?  The spectre of death is still around, so why is it that the early 80s seems so much more desolate than today.  Ladies and gentleman I present Exhibit A - 'The Final Cut', possibly the most depressing album ever made.

Although billed as a Pink Floyd album, it is sub titled A Requiem For The Post War Dream by Roger Waters and is effectively his first solo album.  It is charged through with Waters dark suffering represented by both the po faced military imagery that saturate the lyrics and the sparse musical arrangements.  Waters lost his father to the Second World War, as documented in the new addition to the tracklisting - When the Tigers Broke Free.  It is hard to believe in the days of Pop Idols that a song about the slaughtering of hundreds of soldiers could be released as a single, let alone make it into the top 40.

As for the original tracks it's the title track and the Gunners Dream that stand proudest today.  Two Suns In The Sunset closes everything up in non-more bleak style with a chilling depiction of nuclear holocaust.

Whether the Final Cut makes the grade today depends on where you rest on the love them/hate them scale of the Floyd and more specifically Waters, but maybe the time is right for the sons of the Falklands to vent their anger anew.