Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason didn’t begin – or end – all that well.
Roger Waters, Floyd’s 1970s-era mastermind, had no interest in jumpstarting the band again with David Gilmour and Nick Mason in advance of this project. When they elected to go on without him, Waters unsuccessfully sued over the rights to use the band name — stating that Pink Floyd was a “spent force creatively.”
Some said Momentary Lapse of Reason proved it. Despite having included “Learning to Fly,” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Rock charts, the album arrived on September 7, 1987 with a small army of guest writers and musicians, giving the entire enterprise a disjointed, transitional feel.
Still, the dream-like “Yet Another Movie” – paired here with a closing instrumental titled “Round and Round” – represents the best of what the remaining Floyds still had to offer at this late date.
They start with a buoyant keyboard signature (though the late Richard Wright was still being listed as a session musician), and continue through the appropriate lifting of soundbites from “Casablanca” (get it?, another movie?), and an extended, elegiac coda that started life as one of a trio of demos apparently rejected by Roger Waters for The Final Cut project.
It’s not enough to save Momentary Lapse of Reason from its biggest stumbles – that too-poppy hit single, the too-draggy “Sorrow” and the too-familiar “Dogs of War” – but “Yet Another Movie/Round and Round” serves as a glimpse into the smaller successes that the trio of David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason would muster for Pink Floyd’s subsequent releases, The Division Bell and The Endless River.
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