Artist: Roger Waters | Album: The Dark Side of the Moon Redux | Genre: Art rock, Spoken word | Year: 2023

From: Great Bookham, UK | Label: SGB

For fans of: Dull poetry, Being sleepy, Being disappointed even though you know something’s not going to be good but you subject yourself to it anyway

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I generally do my best to be positive on this site. I cover music I like (mostly), and I aim to give acts the benefit of the doubt when possible. I’ve heard it said that critics should be curators, not gatekeepers, and that is an ethos I strive for. But every now and then, you run across a flaming pile of shit so spectacularly bad, you have to stop and gawk. It’s a trainwreck with bodies strewn everywhere, and the mere sight of it makes you sick, but you can’t look away. And to top it all off, the person driving the train is a notoriously unpleasant curmudgeon. When a situation like this arises, it’s hard not to react to the spectacle.

Having a nice, long hate on an album can be a fun, cathartic exercise on occasion. I haven’t really done that on this site before now, but it’s something I did a number of times when I was writing reviews on my personal Facebook page. The Astonishing, Dream Theater’s overblown, under-thought rock opera, was a particularly fun record to bash. I’m looking forward to expanding on that in my eventual Dream Theater Deep Dive. (I did bash Leprous’s last two albums pretty hard, but even my Aphelion review found some limited good.)

I touched on this briefly in my Pink Floyd Deep Dive, but Roger Waters is pretty easy and fun to dislike. He often comes off as a self-important douche who is deeply unpleasant to spend time around. Normal, likable people don’t get married five times or have irreparable rifts with coworkers. Sure, his politics are not too terribly different from my own on most fronts, but his sanctimony goes a long way in making me second-guess those overlapping views. 

He only seems to have gotten more unpleasant in his old age, too. His spats with David Gilmour, which seemed to have quieted down a bit in the mid-2000s, have only flared back up as nasty as ever in recent years. And the dude is even on Russia’s side in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Add into that mix some additional ridiculous, egotistical statements–like his bitter, petulant outburst that he is “far, far, far more important” than The Weeknd when the Canadian press didn’t give his tour enough attention–and it’s easy to see why it’s hard to look away from his nonsense.

Now, to Roger’s credit, he’s not intending for this to be a replacement for The Dark Side of the Moon. This work is presented as a different take on things. The album is a reflection on life and death, and re-recording it with another fifty years of life experience sounds like a concept that could work… theoretically. The problem is, Roger’s best work was always strongly reliant on David Gilmour and Rick Wright providing significant musical input. This manifestation of Dark Side simply lacks that ineffable spark that made the original one of the greatest rock albums of all time. In many ways, this release feels like him attempting to diminish the importance of the other members of Pink Floyd and cast himself as the act’s true creative force.

Continue reading “Album Review: Roger Waters – The Dark Side of the Moon Redux” →