Roger that, Waters is back
ONE OF the small thrills of modern life is when an artist whom you’ve admired for years, decides after a 25-year hiatus to release new music.
This isn’t just any artist, this is someone who led me to devotedly spin his band’s records since I first discovered, at the age of 10, the graphically provocative cover of their Dark Side of the Moon LP among my dad’s vinyl collection, stuffed between Raw Power and After The Gold Rush.
Obviously I can only be talking about the great English singersongwriter, composer and bassist, Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd and the transmogrified album, The Wall.
The Waters whose solo work includes the exuberance of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, the amnesia-tic and wayward Radio K.A.O.S. and the precision and sobering reminder of Amused to Death. This is the Waters who staged one of the largest and most profligate rock concerts in music history, The Wall – Live in Berlin after the 1989 fall of the Berlin wall, that attracted officially over 200 000 ardent fans and the Waters who was inducted into the USA’S Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and the UK Music Hall of Fame belatedly in 2005. Waters announced his first rock album in 25 years, Is This The Life We Really Want?, that will be released on Columbia Records on June 2.
If the first single, Smell The Roses, is anything to go by, it is destined to be firmly sat in the think rock category depicting a sometimes scathing portrayal of modern cultural anxieties with an idealist’s precision and pathos so akin to Water’s writing style.
His last studio album, 1992’s Amused To Death, had once again themes of a political nature exploring the fantasy of the immediacy of TV reporting and images affecting the psyche in the age of the First Gulf War.
On Is This The Life We Really Want?, Waters digs his subconscious even deeper into the realms of everyman’s apparent paltry concerns while the world seems to end on a daily basis.
Produced and mixed by longtime collaborator Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Paul Mccartney, Beck, U2), the album includes 12 new Roger Waters musical compositions and studio performances.
Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine earlier this month, Waters describes the themes he tackles on the album and personally: “I like to think that people would still like to live in a world where we might address the problems of climate change, where we might understand that if we empathise with others, it makes us feel happier.
“Maybe we should start looking at happiness indexes rather than if we win and lose.
“And if we do that, then we may start to understand that the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is actually an illusion.”