Description
This album has been reconstituted from the scraps of 1993’s Division Bell sessions. Its title is lifted from that record’s nostalgic closing track, High Hopes. Rick Wright – composer of stand-out tracks like The Great Gig in the Sky – had spoken about his “love” for some of the music cut from Division Bell and his surviving bandmates have polished it up as a tribute to him.
All the post-Barrett ingredients are there: Gilmore’s guitar slips like intergalactic whale song through Wright’s ghostly synths, the slow-rolling yaw of Guy Pratt’s basslines, a sleazy sax solo and thumping palpitations from Nick Mason’s drum-kit, which give way to the spliffed-out perspective of exhaled backing vocal “ahhhh”s. Stephen Hawking reprises his Division Bell appearance against a jazzy piano sway on a track called Talkin’ Hawkin’. The crisp production is set to interstellar cruise control. This band always makes your speakers feel inadequate.
