Pink Floyd’s engineer Andy Jackson may have cursed his employer when the band’s farewell album was released just ahead of his own endeavour, but he could still reap the benefit. While The Endless River is a painstakingly constructed memorial, hemmed in by Floyd’s trademarks, Signal To Noise treads a similar sonic path but with no such constraints.
You could waste a lot of time ticking off the Floyd influences – the more you look, the more you’ll find – because for every similarity, there’s a couple of sounds you’ll never hear on a Floyd album. It also distracts you from listening to the album on its own merits.
Self-written and performed, Signal To Noise has a loose theme – the stresses and strains of everyday life.
It’s beautifully set up on the opening soundscape, The Boy In The Forest, and best encapsulated on One More Push, evoking the legend of Sisyphus (yeah, Ummagumma, I know) and It All Came Crashing Down, which puts it into words: ‘The knowledge of choice/The crackle of stillness/The signal to noise.’
The album’s sense of purpose means no gimmicks are required./o:p
