Roger Waters - Is This The Life We Really Want? (Album Review)
Thursday, 08 June 2017
Written by Jacob Brookman
Roger Waters divides opinion. To fans of his music, he is somewhere between wrecking-ball egotist and misunderstood genius. To non-fans, he is a champagne hippy whose ostentatious stage shows highlight hypocrisy within the counterculture movement he led with Pink Floyd.
His fourth solo album, ‘Is This The Life We Really Want?’ demonstrates the tenacity of his public persona. It is a work of intense political poetry that has been written and arranged with a degree of intellectualism rare in rock music.
Waters has doubled down on Pink Floyd-esque composition throughout, and frequent Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich's production has greatly helped with its cinematic soundscapes, orchestral arrangements and a sparing use of synthesizers - which are usually the first thing to age.
The challenge actually comes in the form of his lyrics, which are sometimes marvellous, and sometimes shockingly bad. This is best represented by what should be the spiritual high point of the entire album: the run of lyrics from the centrepiece and title track.
“And every time a student is run over by a tank / And every time pirate’s dog is forced to walk the plank / And every time a Russian bride is advertised for sale / And every time a journalist is left to rot in jail / And every time a young girl’s life is casually spent / And every time a nincompoop becomes the President / Every time somebody dies reaching for their keys / And every time that Greenland falls in the fucking sea.”
On the one hand, you have a varied and compelling polemic, listing the infuriating injustices of the world in a way that is generally avoided by modern lyricists - possibly for the fear of appearing too preachy. It’s a beguiling and hypnotic lyric, and demonstrates a confidence and defiance that is eye-watering.
On the other hand, directly political lyrics don’t give the listener much room to think for themselves. More importantly, the concepts here are a little scattergun. One needs only to flip on a news report to hear about global warming and jailed journalists, but a pirate’s dog? Waters has always thrown in lyrical scherzos to check that we're listening carefully, but too often his opinions feel heavy handed and clumsy, while the concepts largely feel dated.
It wouldn’t be so striking if there weren’t stridently superior examples of this kind of lyric writing. The infuriating thing is that they were also written by Waters, or rather...co-written with the rest of Pink Floyd.
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