Roger Waters - Is This the Life We Really Want?

Drowned In Sound 80

Anyway, I’m sure Floyd fans and Waters die hards alike will be as happy as flying pigs in shit at the amount of activity in each respective camp, and to quote the man himself on Is This The Future We Really Want's brilliantly weird little intro ‘When We Were Young’: “who gives a fuck, it’s never really over”.

After his last concept album, 1992 Amused To Deathhttp://dis11.herokuapp.com/releases/18933/reviews/4149250, which commented on television’s encroaching influence in daily life, especially around the time of the first gulf war, it’s heartening to hear him still with a belly full of fire and a head buzzing full of ideas on ITTLWRW - the voice might falter and wobble a bit more these days, but that anger and appetite are still very much there. Touching on life in 2017, I can imagine Waters out of his mind witnessing what’s happening around the world these days: “picture a shithouse with no fucking dreams, picture a leader with no fucking brains_” his grizzled, off kilter American accent snarls on ‘Picture That’.

Produced by Nigel Godrich, the trademark Waters growl gets some absolutely lush instrumentation to wander around in: it’s not as obtuse or as grim as A Moon Shaped Pool, for instance, but many of the same ingredients are there: synths buzz and glide, string sections wax and wane, and guitars strum and scream. Perhaps a nod to The Wall, there’s also a lot of sonic collaging, cutting up Waters’ speech, telephone conversations, train announcements, and even a shipping forecast in there for good measure. It sets the mood perfectly, very subtly garnished around the album to give it that sense of impending doom, but never fully submitting to it.

It’d be interesting to see how much Godrich has built up on these songs, as a lot feel like sun-soaked acoustic Americana, but elevated into something a lot grander with the humongous string sections and subtle atmospherics. ’Broken Bones’ is a prime example - all country strums, and baritone growl lifted with soaring strings and dashes of slide guitar. The partnership works fantastically well, and those plucked electric guitars that Radiohead do so well bleed into the record, particularly on the brilliantly creepy ’The Life We Really Want’ - it’s almost as if Yorke, Greenwood and co. are the backing band by proxy, which is no bad thing.

The strings actually remind me of Sea Change by Beck - another record that Godrich had a hand in. His masterful arrangements and dynamics really made that album something special, and it’s no different here: there’s something in the way he gets a piano, a drum kit, and a string section to play together that sounds like absolute fucking honey, and by the time we get to ‘A Bird In A Gale’, he’s just showing off. The bastard.

It’s strange to hear lyrics so literal, and so un-cloaked in any kind of intellectual smoke-and-mirrors: it’s what you get with Waters - a raw, jagged-to-the-bone stream of ideas, spat with such ferocity that you forget he’s now in his seventies. Sometimes he strays into cliche, but as it’s delivered with such conviction, you can forgive him such transgressions.

It’s also a big album: a long, sprawling epic that stretches out for it’s slightly-padded running time, but one so full of ideas and intricacies that it’s an easy album to get sucked into - a sonic world you can get lost in, permeated with that familiar swirling synth sound that slides all over one of Waters’ best Floyd records - Animals. It also feels very intimate - Waters's voice feels like he’s right in front of you the entire time: he’s there, not flinching, and he’ll sit with you for about an hour and let you know where we’re all going wrong. And to that, you have to say fair enough.

Pitchfork 69

It’s been abundantly well documented that by the time Pink Floyd set out to record their sprawling 1979 double album The Wall, internal friction over bassist/frontman Roger Waters’ push for creative control had reached a breaking point. In a sense, The Wall crushed the classic lineup of Pink Floyd, but it’s been Waters who’s had the hardest time getting out from under its weight. For much of his solo career—1987’s Radio K.A.O.S. and 1992’s Amused to Death in particular—he has more or less repeated The Wall’s musical style and conceptual grandiosity, at times appearing both stuck and ungrounded without his former bandmates. Waters has even staged his own productions of The Wall and released two different live recordings of it.

On paper, his decision to work with famed producer Nigel Godrich for Is This the Life We Really Want? looks like a much-needed injection of new blood. After all, Godrich’s signature sound has been a cornerstone in the legacies of Radiohead and Beck. His touch is immediately apparent from the outset, as Is This the Life opens with a ticking clock, bass played in the pulse of a heartbeat, and muffled voices—like Radiohead’s OK Computer interlude “Fitter Happier” meets the iconic intro to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon cut “Time.” Before you can make out what the voices are saying, their cadence and tones suggest a broadcast of some kind—a motif that runs through both Radio K.A.O.S. and Amused to Death.

As the voices come into focus, you realize you’re hearing multiple tracks of Waters himself. At first, the words come tumbling down in a heap of unrelated gibberish. “Where are you now?” asks one of the voices. Then, after a slight pause: “Don’t answer that.” Another: “I’m still ugly; you’re still fat.” Eventually, a train of thought begins to form: “Our parents made us who we are. Or was it God? Who gives a fuck; it’s never really over.” Now craggy and deep, Waters’ speaking voice could probably give the late Orson Welles a run for his money. Without question, he would excel at doing radio theatre. And though Waters’ singing voice was already sounding nicely age-worn in ’92, here he switches with great agility between his usual confidence and a newfound frailty that recalls Johnny Cash’s final output.

Is This the Life leaves little doubt that Waters has seasoned in the 25 years since Amused to Death. But aside from his 2005 opera Ça Ira, he’s still hung up on the same themes. Depending on your perspective, this will either strike you as reassuringly familiar or maddeningly one-track minded—maybe even both. To be fair, Waters was ahead of the curve in lamenting our attachment to media saturation on Amused to Death—modern life has basically become what that album anticipated. So it makes sense that Is This the Life answers back with a plea for sanity. And to his credit, much of it comes across as both sincere and necessary—albeit draped in Waters’ habit of being preachy and pedantic. (Two years ago, he described the new material as his way of sending humanity a mediocre report card.)

Yes, the radio-style announcements at the top of “The Last Refugee” would indicate that Waters hasn’t stretched much beyond his now-predictable arsenal of sound effects. The same goes for its languid drumbeat. The album even calls Godrich into question—tunes like “The Last Refugee” and “Is This the Life We Really Want?” are sometimes hard to tell apart from Sea Change-era Beck. Godrich and Waters didn’t push each other to break new ground as much as one might have hoped. But “The Last Refugee,” with its images of lovers lying “Under lemon tree skies” and “Dreams/Up to our knees/In warm ocean swells,” also shows that Waters has grown into an evocative poet—that is, when he isn’t spelling out his message on songs like “Picture That.” “Picture your kid with his hand on the trigger,” he sings, “Picture prosthetics in Afghanistan.” Then again, it’s hard to argue with a verse like “Picture a shithouse, with no fucking drains/Picture a leader, with no fucking brains.”

Waters’ predictability doesn’t diminish his effortless songwriting, and Is This the Life We Really Want? presents his tightest, most focused songs since the mid-’70s. “Wish You Were Here in Guantanamo Bay,” he sings on “Picture That.” The first letters of the phrase are capitalized in the lyric sheet, a sly nod to both the popular tourist postcard and, of course, to the Pink Floyd song and album of the same name. Even casual fans will spot Waters’ hint of the old melody right away. Is This the Life’s myriad sonic references to his work with Pink Floyd suggest that Waters is comfortable with his past. The more you accept how much his past reflects in his present, the more receptive you’ll be to this album’s charms.

The Guardian 60

(Columbia/Sony)

Musically, Roger Waters’s first album of new material in 25 years, produced by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck etc), is like a compendium of best moments and motifs from Pink Floyd’s early- to mid-70s heyday, from the ticking clock and heartbeat that run through opening numbers When We Were Young and Déjà Vu to vintage synths, swelling strings and station platform announcements. Lyrically, the album finds Waters in pissed-off older man mode and is none the worse for it. Picture That is a litany of modern outrage, from prosthetic limbs in Afghanistan to having an idiot for president. Waters’s voice is nicely cracked these days, weathered by the years but unmistakably his, and a pleasing growl on the likes of Is This the Life We Really Want?, a mid-tempo rocker with weird modulations and stabs of cello. The closing suite, starting with Wait for Her, is touchingly honest.