AMUSED TO DEATH

Amused to death is a boring album, really; The hystorical context, when the work was written by Roger Waters, coincided with the Gulf war in the first years of the nineties...and as usual Floyd ex bassist wrote down in music his own socialist ideas against it. The real problem with this album is the impossibility of the audience to be coinvolved so much with what the album is dealing with, something which didn't happen with "The Wall" and in part with "The Final Cut", where the main themes (alienation, isolation, desolation after a war, and so on) were, and are, common to a lot of people. This work here is simply a political manifesto, which try in some passages to coinvolve the listener using some kind of "Waters deja vu", I'm referring to TV sounds, in this case symbol of how the masses are alienated by the media, same thing as "The Wall", but of course, as I said before, the result is totally different, in fact in this case this is only a pretest to fill the evident void present in this album, which the only argument is politics .

The music is not so good, even though Waters had on his side some great talents like Jeff Beck, Steve Lukather, John Patitucci: the other great problem with this album basically is the lack of valid musical ideas, it's not casual in fact that the same musical piece is used several times, with lyrics changed, from time to time (What God Wants P.1 and P.2)... Interesting "The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range" simply because is the only track that has some kind of capability to involve the audience, anyway from a "Rhytmical" point of view... Most of the songs doesn't really make sense, not on the musical aspect, nor on the lyrical aspect (Too Much Rope, Three Wishes); quite boring and repetitive "Watching TV". In adding: the global sound of the work doesn't recall Floyd sound so much.

A bad album, boring, cold and not worth the buying, not counting that is not prog at all.

1 star.