Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd by Pink Floyd (CD, Nov-2001, 2 Discs, Capitol/EMI Records)

This compilation spans Pink Floyd's career from 1967s 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn' to 1994s 'The Division Bell'. There has been an attempt to segue many of the tracks into each other and the tracks selected do represent a sizeable portion of Pink Floyd's best songs (the selections were voted for by the band themselves and Roger Waters). If tracks like 'Shine on you Crazy Diamond', 'Comfortably Numb', 'Money', 'Another Brick in the Wall (part 2)'and 'Time' do nothing for you then you should perhaps be out buying the latest Crazy Frog record. So, a double CD compilation of great songs from one of the most popular bands ever sounds great. And it is. But...
Pink Floyd were (and are, if applicable) predominantly an album band. Their biggest sellers - 'Dark Side of the Moon', 'Wish You Were Here' and 'The Wall' - are albums that function as units and are so strong that I would actually recommend them more than this compilation, which, in its attempt to collate everything ends up sounding patchy. British television runs any number of top 100 shows (top 100 films ever, top 100 comedy shows ever, etc.) the basic format of which is to run down the list from 100 to 1 showing excerpts from each and having people talk about why they were so good. I always feel after watching one of these programmes that the clips from the featured shows are great, but it's not the same as seeing the show itself. This is how I feel after listening to this compilation.
It could have been more satisfying if it had been compiled chronologically, but the truth is that given the strength of all the main Pink Floyd albums in their own right, any compilation (bar maybe material previously unavailable on CD) is almost certainly redundant.