I don't know what rock I was sleeping under, but apparently Pink Floyd have been busy over the past year putting together a "best of" compilation called Echoes. The concept of a Pink Floyd greatest hits album is rather suspect, and previous compilations of their "best" at the time leave little to be desired. This one looks interesting, though... It's got one "new" track (When the Tigers Broke Free) but what is most interesting is that the song order and arrangement was chosen to (allegedly) make it one seamless experience. Besides making me wish the Empeg's gapless playback was more perfect (please, no lectures about how MP3's can't do gapless playback) I think that it's a pretty cool idea to take the greatest hits and make a "mix" of them.

I really like the selection of songs.. Unlike a lot of Floyd diehards I'm not huge on Atom Heart Mother or Obscured by Clouds so their omission in this set doesn't bother me much. I listen to both albums now and again, but Summer '68 is the only song that I would have liked to have seen here. Obviously some of my other favorites didn't make "the final cut", but for only 2 CD's, I think they did a decent job balancing quality and diversity. The fact that they decided to put Sorrow on this set bothers me a little because it's one of the only Floyd songs I will actually skip over... But I guess David lobbied pretty hard for it.

Well anyway, I'm a sucker for anything Floyd, they're by far my favorite band. But I already have all of the albums, so I'd be interested to hear opinions from anyone who owns this collection. I can't imagine that the "remastering" has done anything drastic to the songs, so I'd really only be buying it for this alleged arrangement of the songs which supposedly took the band a full year to come up with. Is this bunk, or should I go buy it today?