Review Series: The Final Cut | by Pink Floyd (1983)

Roger Waters’ final Floyd record was a dim afterglow of The Wall. It has since aged brighter — we should take heed.

5 Stars (of 5)

Pink Floyd — or one might say Roger Waters, at this point — followed the antithetical “rock opera” The Wall with another concept album. The Final Cut might be an appendix to its ubiquitous predecessor — except it is possibly a better record. Waters’ complex obsession with his father’s battlefield death, before his son could consciously meet him, chokes-out the other motifs of The Wall — the isolation of fame, the nihilistic terror of fascism, the systematic blunting of childhood. What’s left is War and its multidimensional human wreckage.

Around this theme, a restrained Floyd creates an extended ballad of keyboard, acoustic, string, and horn textures. Besides a couple stray rockers (including the defiant “Not Now John”), and the occasional plaintive Gilmour solo, the music rides the swirling thought-dream which seems to be Waters’ mind itself. His vulnerable voice is the core instrument. Its limitations and biting tendencies are hardly a disadvantage. Unlike The Wall, there is no need to tell a complex story, balance the soft edges, or diversify to two discs. The continuity of Waters’ observant message burrows into the soul — in a rare manner that is both unsettling and comforting. Music and words are linked, end-to-end, by an effects track probing war’s violent and forgotten fronts (e.g., the hollow careless laughter in the heartbreaking “Paranoid Eyes”).

It is neither easy nor necessary to separate songs from the vivid atmosphere (though “The Gunner’s Dream” requires special mention). Collectively, this is a gift; a delayed funeral to Waters’ father and all that was lost — the uselessly deceased, the tormented remnants left-behind, the betrayed dream, and the idea of peace itself. If the world does in fact end in a second sun, we are left with these voices and stories, hovering even in a nuclear air, to say once upon a time something mattered. Roger Waters’ final Floyd record will be on loop.

Final Thought.

The Final Cut is a shatteringly lucid antiwar study from a man, Roger Waters, who experienced war as poignantly as anyone who did not fight or was not directly victimized. Harrowing, empathetic, and unforgettable — a career achievement.