Is This The Life We Really Want?

Keeping in mind that Roger Waters is a true rock dinosaur, who was involved with the very first Floyd album Piper At The Gates of Dawn, how do you view his latest and long delayed solo album?

Edited by SteveG - June 05 2017 at 04:03

Yes, many prog and rock forums have a thread on this album that gos on for days, but its PA members that I want to hear from. You dig?

^ BTW...had to post above 2x....bye!!

I'm on about my fourth listen by now, Steve...and I seem to jump between `This is astonishing' and `I'm sick to death of this already' from track to track!

It's a reliable effort....Water's sounds great, he's obviously spent a lot of time writing lyrics about political themes that are of great interest to him, and there's a constantly lovely production. Moments like the middle of `Bird in a Gale' are exceptional (and unsurprisingly remind quite a lot of Radiohead, which is no doubt due to their producer Nigel Godrich working on this).

But there's probably just a bit too much Waters singing over piano and big orchestration, often strumming variations on the `Pigs on the Wing/Mother' chords that almost sound identical. Also much of the album has very much a `Paint-by-Floyd' approach - ie this bit sounds ALMOST like `Have a Cigar', `Sheep' etc, which seems very lazy and uninspired. It seems a VERY long 55 minutes too.

It's a fine album, no doubt, but I don't think it's going to have the longevity of his previous solo albums, once everyone gets over the `Roger Waters has a new album out' excitement we're all currently wrapped up in. It doesn't really do much that he hasn't offered in the past, especially from `The Final Cut' onwards...and it's frequently very much like `TFC'.

Edited by Aussie-Byrd-Brother - June 03 2017 at 15:54

Roger is credited to bass, but there's also another bass player - Gus Seyffert - listed on the credits. So I'm assuming Gus played the majority of it...Many parts are very much `Rog and his trusty acoustic guitar' kind of thing, and almost all the acoustic guitar stuff sounds exactly like `Pigs on the Wing' and `Mother'....so much so that you'll likely be able to start singing lines from those tracks and they'll fit right in.

From what I recall, the bass is hardly prominent except for one or two pieces, or not enough to take too much notice of. It's barely a `prog' album by any stretch of the imagination except for a couple of tracks. Bass is about as prominent as it was on `The Final Cut', so therefore not really at all.

I prefer wines to Waters 

On my eighth listen by now....The run in the middle especially of `Is This The Life We Really Want?' that leads right into `Bird in a Gale' is exceptional. That title track has so much f**king danger to it, the intense orchestration and a perfect vocal delivery from Roger. `Broken Bones' is a very nice ballad too.

But its so frustrating that `Smell the Roses' rips off both `Have a Cigar' and `Another Brick in the Wall' so obviously, `Picture That' is `Sheep': part 2, and all of the acoustic guitar spots sound pretty much identical to `Mother/Pigs on the Wing'...All very lazy musically, even if Rog sounds great on them and the playing itself is great. I kind of worry that people are so praising of it because musically some of it is so easy...just falls back on almost remaking earlier Pink Floyd songs, so it's a great comfort to hear some parts of it for the first time and pretty much already know it. I'm just kind of disappointed that both Rog and Nigel Godrich did that, though. Didn't Rog once accuse Floyd's `A Momentary Lapse of Reason' album of being "A fair forgery" of the Pink Floyd sound? On this album he's a far worse offender!

The album also kind of peters out by the final few tracks, where it falls back on those same acoustic strums and more reprises of the Water/piano/orchestration spots.

But, man, when its good....

Edited by Aussie-Byrd-Brother - June 04 2017 at 18:56

Dellinger wrote: The first time I read about Waters preparing a new studio album was when he was on his "In the Flesh" tour. He even played a pair of songs that would suposedly appear on that album. "Each Small Candle" (which appears on the album from that tour, and which I really love), and Flickering Flame (which appears in a studio version on he compilation album... I think with the same name, and which I find somewhat more boring than the other one). And I think he had worked on some other new songs along the years (there was "Leaving Beirut too, which he played when he toured the whole Dark Side of the Moon album). I hoped / expected these songs to end up on his new album, whenever he did end up releasing it. I also remember something about the concepts he had thought for his new album. One was about a taxi driver and the stories he heard when transporting people, and the other was a double album, with one disc having love songs and the other some other theme (war perhaps? He always want to write about war).

mmmhhh!!!.. I read you well about Flame and Candle, but it never dawned on me that they were supposed to be part of an album - outside fan speculations, I don't remember Waters announcing an album (but Al Zheimer could strike me about that). I mean those two track titles are obviously "concept-album" inducing fantasies.

As for the Beirut track, I have no recollection of it and I vaguely remember the taxi-driver project.

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The way I'm spinning this album, it's probably ending up on mly top 10 of the year.

Sean Trane wrote: SteveG wrote: how do you view his latest and long delayed solo album? How has this been much delayed... First time we heard of Waters' new album was around Gilmour Rattle That Lock album release (Sept 2015, I believe). Waters said his album was half-written and it would be ready in 18 months... It's barely two or three months overdue, and he's been touring a lot in the meantime.

It follows Amused To Death by 25 years. Seems overdue to me.

SteveG wrote: This captcha BS has gotten to the an unbearable point if someone as even tempered as Catcher10 is fed up with it. I don't know if the admins have complained to M@X about it, which doesn't mean that they haven't. However, it's high time we complained, politely, to M@X ourselves via a PM. Whose with me?

That would probably be what this month long thread has been covering over 8 pages now (for what's it's worth, nothing has changed about it):
http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=111123