A good chunk of The Final Cut was made from “spare bricks” from The Wall. It’s basically musical leftovers.
If the OP, or anyone for that matter, were looking for the best single album for an instant Pink Floyd collection, I would steer them to Pulse. Maybe a bit too much Division Bell to be truly comprehensive (granted, it’s the live album from that tour) but it includes a full performance of Dark Side plus all of the most essential of their hits.
And I’m not going to lie and say my Pulse light is still blinking (it’s definitely not), and I can’t confirm how long it blinked exactly, but it was at least 6-7 years.
Ya know the battery is replaceable, right? 
For Gilmour-era, my favorite recording has been the Delicate Sound of Thunder live concert. It was, IMO, a more energetic performance than the later Pulse and Division Bell sets. It felt more fun and spontaneous, and less rote, than the later shows.
Did anyone else expect an update from the OP?
Well, it would take a while to seriously listen to half of everyone’s suggestions, so I’d give him a bit more time.
But I understand your feelings. I think Pink Floyd is the best band ever, and I’d like OP to think so, too.
From what I can tell, it’s the story of a British guy going off to fight in WWII and returning with PTSD to take a teaching job in a struggling economy and seeing the England he was fighting for slipping away. The CD had “When the Tigers Broke Free” on it but that wasn’t recorded for The Final Cut. Obviously heavily influenced by Rogers’ opinions on war (and WWII in particular) but not directly about his father so much as English post-war angst.
That’s not to say I think it’s a great album. I think it’s an interesting album but falls in with the rest of the Rogers solo stuff (which is essentially is) of “Things I need to really be in the mood for”. I wouldn’t bother recommending it to anyone trying out Pink Floyd; more like you listen to it because you’ve already committed yourself to sitting through Rogers lengthy treatises because he’s deep, man. Not as dated sounding as Radio KAOS nor as entirely unlistenable as The Pros & Cons of Hitchhiking and with 65% less ‘found footage’ filler than Amused to Death.
I’m surprised no one has suggested A Collection of Great Dance Songs. 
It has a nice cross section of PF’s work and is relatively short. BTW, Grantchester Meadows in DTS:X is just awesome!
Dancing with the Stars season 10? 
I had that concert on VHS and played it to death, while trying to blow out my speakers! I’m sure my neighbors loved me, otherwise I’d be dead and buried over two decades ago.
I would love to find it on DVD/BluRay (officially, that is, w/U.S.A. release).
Understandable, but I would definitely balance the best band ever with the other best band ever, JT. If I could listen to only two bands for the rest of my life, it would be those two.
However, I would definitely have to include Amused to Death, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and Radio KAOS in with the Pink Floyd mix. He might not be to most people’s liking solo, but you cannot deny Waters’ genius. To me, Momentary Lapse, et al, sounds more like afterfloyd.
Honestly, post-Floyd Waters and post-Waters Floyd both sound a bit anemic to my ears. Radio KAOS is a lot of fun, but it’s no better or worse than A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Just as a data point: My wife hates Pink Floyd with a passion. But yesterday while she was getting dressed I played “On the Turning Away.” She said “I like that. Who was it?”
Discussion ensued.
Yep, absolutely. Pink Floyd for the soul, Jethro Tull for the brain, and Bruce Springsteen for the heart. And Dire Straits. 
Sorry it took so long to get to listening, but when I do these, I want to do them right, putting 100 percent into it and really giving my full thoughts for everyone’s amusement or enlightenment or…whatever you get out of reading these. So I wanted for a day I had enough time to write up almost a “play by play” thought process review.
So okay, I just listened to The Wall.
First of all, lot of music…not much singing or lyrics. I didn’t know Pink Floyd was mostly just instrumentals and music solos. Not a fan of that type of thing, in general. I prefer music that has words, because I like music you can sing along to and you can’t sing along to a song that has no words and is just…melody.
So any song by them that is just music and nothing else (no spoken parts) automatically gets judged a little bit lower than the others.
That being said, I liked the start of this album. In the Flesh? Was a very strong opener. It was a good choice for first song. It was sort of like a “Okay…are you ready to ROCK??” intro. It had good vibes.
Another thing I’ve noticed Pink Floyd seems to like to do that I’m not crazy about, though, is to interject random noises (not music) into their music. A plane flying…or crashing. A baby crying. A helicopter. Random mumbling. Sorry, but this isn’t music, it’s random bullshit that distracts from the music, IMO.
ANOTHER thing they tend to do which I’m not too crazy about (I know they did this with Dark Side of the Moon and they seemed to do it here, on The Wall, a bit, too) is to not really have any ENDING to their songs, more like each song just BLEEDS into the next one, so it’s really just ONE, LONG, FUCKING SONG throughout the whole album. I don’t want to listen to one long song…I want to listen to many different songs that have their own beginnings and endings. I’m not too crazy about the “The Thin Ice” fades and then immediately becomes “Another Brick in the Wall”. END THE THIN ICE FULLY AND THEN START ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL, DAMMIT. Is that so hard? And what the fuck is up with Another Brick in the Wall Part 1, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and Another Brick in the Wall Part 2? It’s all the same song! Happiest Days really gets lost here…because the beginning and ending of it is just a Brick Wall song. It should have all just been called “Another Brick in the Wall”…the whole thing, those three songs in a row. Because as it is now, all it is is the band saying “Hey, let’s change the name of the song halfway through the song, when the melody and pitch changes!”
Ugh. So yeah, just not a fan of that style of album making.
Anyway, there are some things I liked about this album: In the Flesh was great, and I liked The Thin Ice, too. Mother was pretty good. Blue Sky was okay, but a little too dreary-sounding for my taste. The last part almost sounds like “Ruby Tuesday” by The Rolling Stones (much like the Happiest Days beginning almost sounded like “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor). I did not like Happiest Days, by the way, because it was just a different part of Another Brick in the Wall, as I said above. I wanted to like Empty Spaces and Young Lust…but again, they did that thing where they just blended them together like one song.
OH, by the way, I HAVE HEARD “Young Lust” before. In commercials and on the radio. I didn’t know 1. It was called that and 2. It was sung by Pink Floyd. I’ve always liked that song, in general, but it’s much better without “Empty Spaces” immediately before it and leading into it, like a FUCKING UNINVITED GUEST WHO HAS OUTSTAYED THEIR WELCOME.
And now we come to what was perhaps MY FAVORITE song (that I had never heard before this) on the album “One of My Turns”, which started out slow and then suddenly changed into a fast, upbeat, out of the blue rocking song…AND ALL WITHOUT EVEN ONE SONG NAME CHANGE, imagine that! I guess the person designated to come up with a new song name every time the tempo changes musta been either asleep or absent on that day. Great song, although it did feature a little bit of that annoying “let’s put random real-life sounds into this song, like glasses and plates breaking!”. Still, I was willing to forgive it a bit more this time, simply because the song rocked. And then it was followed by checks notes and relistens to the whole song Don’t Leave Me Now, which I didn’t like because the entire song was like ONE, BIG WHINE. I don’t want to listen to whine. I want to listen to music. Seriously, could the WORST singer have sung this song? And in the most annoying way possible? Were they trying to go for “Most Annoying Song”? Because I think they got it.
See, one thing about me that most of you have probably noticed by now (especially if you followed along in my Led Zeppelin reviews) is that I like fast, upbeat, rocking songs much more than slow and sad sounding songs. Some slower ones can be good, but most really make you feel kinda depressed and I just didn’t want to feel depressed while listening.
Another “Another Brick in the Wall” part…which really should have just been named “The Song That Never Fucking Ends”. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always liked this song, overall…but hearing it like I had to on the album sucked, because the radio version doesn’t ever play it that way. They don’t go “And here’s Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1!..okay, now a commercial break…and when we come back…Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2! Or, maybe if I feel really crazy today, we’ll just skip two altogether and go straight to Part 3!”. No, they play it all at once, all in a row, edited for radio, just as God intended, which is MUCH better to listen to, IMO. I didn’t like the album version of “Another Brick in the Wall (Parts 1, 2, 3, 34, 59, 107)”.
And then was the only other song I knew before going in this (or at least THOUGHT I knew, before hearing “Young Lust”)…Hey You.
Now THIS was good music. Great music, actually. But again, I had already grown up with this song, hearing it on the radio many, many times over my life. So I already knew I liked it.
Is There Anybody Out There and Nobody Home are examples of two “slower” songs that I liked. They weren’t both dreary or sad sounding…and were really subtle in their sounds. I liked them a lot. Parts of “Is There Anybody Out There” sounded familiar, but the whole thing definitely didn’t, which makes me think if commercials or jingles will just sometimes take very small parts of certain songs to play them, not the whole thing. Some of the instrumental parts sounded like I had heard them before. Anyway “Nobody Home” was probably my second favorite song (after “One of My Turns”).
Vera was good. Bring the Boys Back Home was…uh…interesting. It was okay. It just seemed really out of place on the album, though. Like it was added as an afterthought, just to fill out the album. “Wait, what? We still need two minutes worth of noise? Let’s just say ‘Bring the boys back home’ in a musical way, then, and to music.” Comfortably Numb sounded familiar, it’s possible I’ve heard it on the radio before. The Show Must Go on was okay. Nothing special. In the Flesh (no question mark) I’ve heard before…which then made me go back to the beginning of the album and relisten to In the Flesh? just to make sure it wasn’t that version again and the reason why it sounded so familiar. It was. Oops. Well, at least I’m soaking the stuff up, like a sponge, so that I’ll be able to identify and recognize it from here on…
…although I’m sure there’s gonna be some hardcore fans out there that reply to this telling me that NO, IN THE FLESH? AND IN THE FLESH AREN’T THE SAME SONG AND POINT OUT ALL OF THE DIFFERENCES AS TO WHY THEY’RE TOTALLY DIFFERENT PIECES…but you know what? It doesn’t matter, because I liked both versions! Good songs. Or song. Whatever.
Run Like Hell and Waiting For the Worms were fine. Not bad. Not amazing either, but not bad. Listenable. It’s not anything I’d ever go out and buy an album for, but I wouldn’t change the station if either came on the radio. Wait…was that just a riff from Another Brick in the Wall? sigh They’re even starting to sneak this song into other songs. Why can’t they just leave it alone and let it go? See, Waiting For the Worms started out good. It started out just fine. Until it became Another Brick in the Wall, Part 4. But I guess that’s the theme of this album. I guess that’s why it has that name, eh?
Finally, I did NOT like Stop or The Trial. Stop was far too short and not even good for what it was. Hey, maybe they should have called it Bring the Boys Home, Part 2, since they seem to be a fan of that kind of thing. And The Trial was just REALLY out of place here, it sounded more like a fucking DISNEY movie than anything else. Wayyyy too “cartoony” sounding. Just not a fan. And Outside the Wall was okay…mostly just instrumental.
Overall, it was an interesting collection of sounds and solos and voices and music…it was overly good, but I have to be honest here: It’s not really anything I can ever see myself going out and actually making a point of listening to again. It didn’t seem to capture me that much. I liked it overall, though…but it just wasn’t “amazing”.
So, TL;DR stats:
Songs I had heard before before going in: Hey You, Another Brick in the Wall
Songs I had heard before, but didn’t know they were Pink Floyd songs: Young Lust, Comfortably Numb
Favorite song I had never heard before: One of My Turns
Second favorite song I had never heard before: Nobody Home
Song I hated the most: Either Happiest of Days or Don’t Leave Me Now
Next up: I will give a listen to Dark Side of the Moon again, since it’s been awhile since I heard it.
The Wall is the most conventional album of the lot when it comes to classic Pink Floyd. Seriously. Your head will explode if you listen to Atom Heart Mother.
These are all progressive rock concept albums, and that means song suites, instrumental passages, sound effects, etc. That’s the genre.
If separate songs is your thing, you might then prefer older Floyd. There is some really good material on Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Atom Heart Mother and Meddle, but there are also long (excellent, if you can get into it) songs with massive instrumental bridges.
Perhaps it takes effort, or mushrooms, to appreciate instrumental rock. The fact that you spent a single sentence on Comfortably Numb is kind of disturbing. The end-piece to that song (not quite a guitar solo, per se, since there is significant underlayment to the guitar) is absolutely epic. It fucking speaks, through the music. If you cannot heard what a bridge is saying (ideas that may not render to words), bands like Pink Floyd just might not be the right fit for you.
I don’t think so. I think it takes an appreciation for music-as-music, especially if you play an instrument.
Regarding The Wall, it’s a concept album. The whole thing tells a story, which you may or may not be able to follow if you haven’t seen the movie of the same name. The movie is where all the sound effects come from.
Don’t go run out and find the movie, you should probably be way more of a fan boy before you watch it. It be like someone trying to like Led Zeppelin by watching The Song Remains The Same.
Anyways, so you kinda jumped the gun with The Wall. It’s an intense album, but many people put it at the top of their list, I know I do. I’m not sure why you said it doesn’t have many lyrics. I know I could rattle of the lyrics to most of that album if I needed to. Perhaps you’re just used to more.
My suggestion, would be to back track a bit. Go back and listen to Dark Side Of The Moon. As I mentioned earlier. If you want to know Pink Floyd, you really should have a good grasp of that album.
If you want to move forward, go with Animals or Meddle. I love Animals, some people love Meddle. Animals is a handful of very long songs, but they’re really, really good. You’ll probably hate them!
My only other suggestion is that you give The Wall another shot, but just go after the popular songs.
Another Brick In The Wall Part 2
Young Lust
Hey You
Comfortably Numb
Get to know those songs really, really well. Then come back for:
Mother
Waiting for the worms
(and whatever else is left after that).
No wonder it took you so long to come back. It’s like dropping acid for your first time with no one to hold your hand.
In your review of The Wall, you mentioned that you’d probably heard Comfortably Numb before. It’s probably hard now to separate your overall feeling for the album vs the particular song, but I recommend a listen/watch to one or two live versions. Dave’s solo at the end is truly one of the masterpieces of rock.