The Band That Wouldn't Die

By GUY GARCIA *

Hearing the first few minutes of The Division Bell, the new album by Pink Floyd that stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for four weeks, a listener has a distinct sense of deja vu. Mysterious rumbling noises on Cluster One, the first song, set a cosmic tone, and then comes What Do You Want from Me, with its languid beat and spare, spaced-out ambiance. It all seems reminiscent of the band's 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, which sold more than 15 million copies and stayed on Billboard's Top 200 album chart for an astounding 15 years. Given that success, who wouldn't want to return to old habits? In its heavy, adolescent way, though, Dark Side of the Moon was a classic; The Division Bell is anything but.

By the fourth number, an instrumental called Marooned, the record veers off into a morass of sustained piano chords, droning synthesizers and gimmicky sound effects. The aural tricks that seemed so daring on earlier Pink Floyd disks -- running footsteps, echoing guitars -- are now impossibly dated and predictable. Even worse are the lyrics, which rarely rise above the sentiments of a greeting card. "Her love rains down on me easy as the breeze," guitarist David Gilmour sings on Take It Back. "I listen to her breathing it sounds like the waves on the sea." Only Keep Talking, propelled by interlocking guitars, manages to rise above the muck.

The album's title refers to a British parliamentary procedure that divides the House of Commons into two opposing camps and also alludes to the rift between Gilmour and bassist Roger Waters, who left Pink Floyd in 1984. It was Waters who in the early 1970s masterminded the band's transformation from an acid-rock act into a sleek, shadowy outfit that used high-tech wizardry and mordant humor to skewer greedy capitalists, warmongering generals and -- most evil of all -- nasty headmasters. With Waters as its leader, Pink Floyd became famous for its surrealistic, multimedia concerts, culminating with the tour for the band's 1980 album The Wall. Those shows were extravaganzas that ended with a 30-ft.-tall wall of ersatz bricks crashing down on the stage.

Four years later, Waters' decision to leave Pink Floyd triggered a battle over the legal rights to the group's name. Waters lost, and Gilmour, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason carried on as Pink Floyd and released 1987's A Momentary Lapse of Reason, an album that managed to rehash the group's trademark sound. Waters, who feels betrayed by his old mates, still holds a grudge. Gilmour is more conciliatory. A sense of wounded wistfulness crops up repeatedly in The Division Bell. "So I open my door to my enemies," Gilmour laments on Lost for Words. "And I ask could we wipe the slate clean/ But they tell me to please go f--- myself/ You know you just can't win."

Of course, even without Waters, the current album is selling well, and fans have bought more than 3 million tickets for Pink Floyd's current U.S. tour. The 16-year-olds at those concerts -- eager like so many 16-year-olds before them to hear such alienated anthems as Money and Another Brick in the Wall -- may be too young to notice or care about Waters' absence. In pop music, inertia and a name can carry you a long way; with The Division Bell, Pink Floyd is trying to discover just how far.