Rick Wright [1996] Broken China

[01] Breaking Water
[02] Night Of A Thousand Furry Toys
[03] Hidden Fear
[04] Runaway
[05] Unfair Ground
[06] Satellite
[07] Woman Of Custom
[08] Interlude
[09] Black Cloud
[10] Far From The Harbour Wall
[11] Drowning
[12] Reaching For The Rail
[13] Blue Room In Venice
[14] Sweet July
[15] Along The Shoreline
[16] Breakthrough



amg: This rather humdrum effort from Pink Floyd's keyboard player does have touches of his former band's haunting ambience, but the tracks on Broken China lazily skim along on shallow waves of new age-like synthesizer passages and lilting rhythms rather than engulf its concept of a man who is experiencing the repercussions of clinical depression, which is in itself Pink Floyd-like. The album is divided up into four sections, each representing a different stage of the character's mental illness. The idea is interesting enough and, while Wright's vocals are eerily reminiscent of Roger Waters, the concept fails to gain any momentum from one cycle to another. The music is dark...but too dark, and the lyrics are abstract...only they're too abstract. Wright gets too caught up in the complexities of his imagery, so much so that he fails to extend his concept outwardly in the form of music or message. Rather than jut out or take hold, the tracks all converge into each other with little or no rhythmic resurgence or elevation. "Reaching for the Rail" and "Breakthrough" are sung by Sinead O'Connor, one of the album's upsides, while oboe and cello add noticeable weight to the music's somberness in all the right places. Wright's first solo release, entitled Wet Dreams, is a much more entertaining effort, as is Zee-Identity, his 1984 collaboration with Dave Harris.
(amg 8/10)

Rick Wright [1978] Wet Dream

[01] Mediterranean C
[02] Against The Odds
[03] Cat Cruise
[04] Summer Elegy
[05] Waves
[06] Holiday
[07] Mad Yannis Dance
[08] Drop In From The Top
[09] Pink's Song
[10] Funky Deux



amg: Following the release of the 1977 album Animals and its accompanying "In the Flesh" tour, Pink Floyd went on hiatus, having become popular enough to support solo albums by bandmembers who were inclined to make them. Guitarist David Gilmour and keyboard player Richard Wright were. For his album, Wright assembled some of the backing musicians who had been accompanying Pink Floyd for years, in particular reed player Mel Collins and guitarist Snowy White. So it was no surprise that the resulting record, Wet Dream, sounded like outtakes from Pink Floyd sessions. Wright's keyboards had always been a major element in the Pink Floyd sound, and his singing and songwriting had also been a big part of the group's music, despite the increasing domination of Roger Waters. On Wet Dream, he was interested in providing typically slow, contemplative, keyboard-based arrangements and singing (on about every other tune) in a becalmed, echoey voice of marital discord and escape. Wright's conflict with Waters shortly would lead to his being dismissed from Pink Floyd (and then, bizarrely, hired back as a sideman), and in a sense his release of Wet Dream could be seen as an attempt to step out on his own. But the material, while pleasant enough, seemed more like music he might have written to work on with Pink Floyd if he still had as much input into the group as he had had back around the time of Dark Side of the Moon, rather than like an independent solo statement. It was hard to imagine anyone but Pink Floyd fans wanting to listen to such an album, and as it turned out not even enough of them cared, since the album sold poorly.
(amg 6/10)