Some believe it’s a masterpiece. Other’s dismiss it as Pink Floyd’s weakest. And still others will tell you that it’s not really a Pink Floyd album at all, but rather a glorified Roger Waters solo project.
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So, what is The Final Cut exactly? Well, as the kids might say these days, it’s a lot. A lot of explosions, a lot of cumbersome tempos, a lot of Roger Waters screaming about wars past and present. Listening to it in one sitting makes for a bit of an exhausting experience. But if you cherry-pick The Final Cut, you’ll find several tracks that will spruce up any art-rock playlist you might have in mind. Here is a countdown of the five best songs on Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut.
5. “The Post War Dream”
Many of the songs on The Final Cut had already been written by Waters as part of the batch of songs that became The Wall. The fact that they were releasing these leftovers grated on David Gilmour and was one of his chief objections to the album. But Waters also wrote several new songs that were inspired by The Falklands War in 1982 between the UK and Argentina. “The Post War Dream” shares a lot of similarities with the John Prine classic “Sam Stone,” from the main melody to the theme of sacrifice done in vain. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty, albeit short, opening track, and the melodic motif would be brought back at several other points in the album to serve as a kind of connecting piece. In the refrain, Waters calls out Margaret Thatcher for her decision-making: Maggie, what have we done?
4. “The Final Cut”
This is another leftover from The Wall demos. Waters utilizes it as a way to show how a regular modern guy can be hounded by the past. His lyrics speak of a man who sees horrors everywhere in what should be his sanctuary. He tries to reach out, but his years of isolating himself leave him too shellshocked to do it properly. Finally, he considers suicide in a chilling moment: I held the blade in trembling hands prepared to make it but /Just then the phone rang / I never have the nerve to make the final cut. The song benefits from Gilmour’s presence on lead guitar (a rare thing on the album), while the swirling synths played by co-producer Michael Kamen echoes similar sounds from The Wall standout “Comfortably Numb.”
3. “Two Suns in the Sunset”
If you weren’t paying too much attention to this song’s lyrics, you might think it’s a quiet closing track. Its benign, mostly acoustic music seems less dire than the rest of the album. That is, until you do take a close look at the lyric sheet. The second sun Waters references is caused by a nuclear bomb that one of the warmongers has initiated. That unexpected juxtaposition is something that classic Floyd did quite well, and it’s what makes this such an effective closer. Waters leaves us all with the bleakly ironic notion of a world-ending war finally uniting society: Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend /We were all equal in the end.
2. “When the Tigers Broke Free”
This song is the great orphan of the Pink Floyd catalog. It was written for The Wall, but didn’t make it onto the final album. It was included in the film of the album, and was released as a single in 1982. Although it was even advertised at one point that it would be part of The Final Cut, it was also left on the original version of that album, only to be restored in reissues. “When the Tigers Broke Free” is a moving account of the death of Roger Waters’ father in World War II. The pomp and circumstance of the brass, strings, and choir is usually meant to suggest patriotism and honor. But here it’s used to amplify Waters’ sorrow and rage. Beyond all that, it’s a truly lovely melody. Waters is able to convey the emotions here by simply telling the story, detail for detail, as it happened.
1. ”The Gunner’s Dream”
If it gave us nothing else, The Final Cut would still be important as the home of “The Gunner’s Dream.” Going back to “Us and Them,” Waters has always been expert at expressing the absurdity of war. Here, he manages to do it in novel fashion. He imagines the final thoughts of a soldier falling to his death after being gunned out of the sky. And the music matches the lyrics in import. Especially moving is the moment when Waters’ piercing scream on the word dream seamlessly morphs into the sound of the anguished saxophone solo of Raphael Ravenscroft. This track is on a level with Floyd’s finest work as a band. They weld a strong lyrical point of view to ingenious music that both expresses and embellishes the ideas and emotions of the words.
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