Roger Waters "Is This The Life We Really Want?" 2017****

I recently saw Roger Waters play Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome. The concert was in the cadre of his Us And Them tour, one of his most ambitious (and certainly most political) thus far. Having already seen Pink Floyd circa '89, Waters again in the 00's and David Gilmour lately, I have enough for comparison and I can honestly say that this may well have been the best of them. Granted, the songs don't sound the same without Gilmour's guitar, and I would have liked to hear "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". But other than that, it was a top band that also featured an unexpected guest: American songwriter Jonathan Wilson whom Waters introduced as the band's resident hippie and who sang and even looked a lot like a young Gilmour. Music aside though, Waters proved he was the visionary behind the band by putting on a whole multi-media performance rather than just playing the songs. This time the concert centered around Floyd's angriest LP, 1977's "Animals" as well as around Waters' latest. Donald Trump was the "guest of honour" given the role of the quintessential Pig during the same-named song, but other world "leaders" also featured as token pigs, from Israel's Netanyahu to Turkey's Erdogan and beyond. The first part ended with a version of "Another Brick in The Wall" featuring a local kids' chorus and finished with a giant "Resist" sign. Waters then proceeded during the intermission to remind us what/whom he thought we should resist. My favorite was "Resist Israel's Anti-Semitism" following another slide defining Anti-Semitism as the practice of discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity. Interestingly, only a few weeks after the show, Israeli parliament passed a law declaring Israel "a Jewish State" further downgrading the position of Bedouins and other minorities. Since he began campaigning against Israel's neo-appartheid policy, Waters has been walking with a target  on his back - figuratively, of course, since the Israeli state does not assassinate people. At least not Westerners. Unless they come between their armed forces and the demolition of Palestinian houses, like Rachel Corrie did. Palestine, of course, is only one of many causes Waters is campaigning about at the moment. As a result he can sometimes seem unbearably preachy, since after all the audience comes to his concerts to have a good time, not for the speaches. Hell, even I felt like shouting "Hey teacher, leave us kids alone!" despite agreeing with him in most counts. But when the world is going down the toilet you have to do something better than hold your nose and pretend it isn't happening, don't you?

So here's Waters' new state of the nation address, 25 years after Amused To Death, his attack on media culture and war-as-spectacle during the first Gulf War. As pessimistic as that album was, it still couldn't predict how badly our reality would evolve: the oceans of trash dumped into our brains daily through mass "social" media, the climatic change of pre-apocalyptic proportions shrugged off by the brainwashed public, the rabid hate of religious fanatics and fearmongering of politicians urging us to close the borders to the masses of the "third world" trying to escape the wastelands of our making. As you can imagine, the lyricist behind Animals and The Wall has a lot to say about all this. Mostly he's directly in-your-face about it: "Picture a shithouse with no fucking drains/ Picture a leader with no fucking brains" is a crude but acute description of Trump's AmeriKKKa. But he can also be poignant: The story of mother-and-child separation of "The Last Refugee" can be rejected as corny sentimentalism, but what other way is there to approach a tragedy repeatedly happening before our doorstep? On the other hand he can be sarcastically self-deprecating: If the rockstar of "Déjà Vu" became God he'd start by making faces less affected by age and alcohol. Scattered among the polemic there are moments of evocative poetry and tenderness, like "Wait For Her", inspired by a Palestinian love poem. Together, it adds up to Waters' best writing since "The Wall" - provided you have the stomach for its brutal, singleminded, often way too literal, honesty. Or, according to Waters' critics, hypocrisy: after all, what right does a priviledged millionaire have to critisize "the system" from the comfort of his huge mansion?

The initial idea was a more theatrical concept piece in the vein of The Wall, but producer Nigel Godrich (of Radiohead fame) persuaded him to break it down to smaller, more easily swallowed, song-sized bites. It's still grandiose at times, helped with the use of strings, and evokes all of his post-Wall albums in its excessive use of sound effects, radio samples etc, as well as the theatrical half-spoken vocal. Waters' voice, by the way, is starting to match his looks: weathered and broken, yet defiant. Unlike some of his other albums though, behind every track here there's the bare backbone of an acoustic-based song. Electric guitars (played by Jonathan Wilson) take a back seat: one can explain it as Waters escaping the shadow of his former bandmate Gilmour, but I'm not sure I like it. After the opening ballads "Déjà Vu" and "The Last Refugee", "Picture This" is a more aggressive number with 80's synths and nimble bass. "Bird in a Gale" is this album's equivalent to "Run Like Hell" while "Smell The Roses" sounds like something out of Floyd's Animals. Waters lays down some killer bass lines. It's followed by a trio of rather calm songs: "Wait for Her", "Oceans Apart" and "Part of Me Died" ensure that the album ends on a tender, as opposed to angry, note. Still, the question remains "Is this the life we really want?/ It surely must be so/ For this is a democracy and what we all say goes". And, if it isn't, then what are we doing about it? Ultimately this might well be Waters' best, and easily most accessible, solo album. Godrich's work as arranger/producer on it has been universally praised for making it more down-to-earth, but I'm not sure he was the best choice: Now that Waters decided to listen to someone else after 40 years of authoritarian approach to recording, I wish he had found an associate more sympathetic to his Floydian past, someone like Steven Wilson for example. He might have turned this into a triple-disc prog opera. It wouldn't sell as much, but it'd make Floyd fans happy. Something for the future, probably. If Waters picks up his pace. I'm not sure we have the luxury of waiting another 25 years, maybe this is the final word. In that case, it's not a bad one.

**** for Déjà Vu, The Last Refugee, Picture That, Is This the Life We Really Want?, Smell the Roses, Wait for Her

*** for Broken Bones, Bird in a Gale, The Most Beautiful Girl, Oceans Apart, Part of Me Died

** for When We Were Young