On his first album in 25 years, Roger Waters has brought back the tense mood of isolation that characterized Pink Floyd. But this time the nemesis isn’t abstract — it’s Donald Trump.
The rock legend Friday released “Is This the Life We Really Want?”, his first studio album since 1992, accompanied by an extensive tour with a characteristically elaborate show that incorporates his signature work, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”
The 73-year-old has long conceptualized rock albums around ideas — “The Wall” about a boy’s struggle to connect to humanity and “The Dark Side of the Moon” probing the roots of mental illness.
The characters in “Is This the Life We Really Want?” similarly conjure up terrifying worlds. “The Last Refugee,” spliced with radio snippets, depicts the treacherous flight to safety at the end of a calamitous war.
“Deja Vu” is the latest in a series of theological ruminations on Waters’ albums, as he imagines a God who is impotent to stop violence and environmental destruction.
Yet if his previous music often took on a timelessness, “Is This the Life We Really Want?” is unambiguously an album of 2017.
Trump pervades the music, with the title track even sampling a recording from one of the US president’s regular complaints about media coverage.
“Picture That,” one of the hardest-edged songs on the album, erupts into a rock interlude when Waters makes a charged reference to Trump.
Waters — an Englishman who lives in New York and once owned an apartment a few blocks from Trump Tower — elsewhere bemoans the trajectory of the planet since World War II, the conflict in which his father died and has weighed heavily on the artist.
“We could have picked over them broken bones / We could have been free / But we chose to adhere to abundance / We chose the American Dream,” he sings.
Waters has sold a respectable number of albums since leaving Pink Floyd but his superstardom comes as a live act, with his 2010-13 “The Wall Live” world tour the highest-grossing ever for a solo artist.
Waters, who recently embarked on a 61-date show of North America, is also pulling no punches on Trump from stage.
At a tour preview in New Jersey, a balloon pig bearing the image of a sneering Trump floated through the crowd as Waters played from Pink Floyd’s “Animals” album.
Performing one of Pink Floyd’s best-known songs, “Another Brick in the Wall, a troupe of children swayed on stage in orange prison jumpsuits, before opening them to show T-shirts with the word “Resist.”
Beyond the politics, Waters in concert proves again that he is a master of stage effects with lasers beaming throughout the arena. By the second act the show took on the atmosphere of a factory with mock smokestacks and screens that descended into the crowd like walls.
For all of the loaded messaging, “Is This the Life We Really Want?” is driven by a surprisingly subtle musical base.
As is Waters’ wont, the album is full of samples, but the unifying sound is a melancholy acoustic guitar rather than the more synthesized sound that undergirded much of his other solo work.
Waters worked on the album with producer Nigel Godrich, who is so known for his work with experimental rock icons Radiohead that he has been called the sixth member.
Godrich, in an earlier interview with AFP in Paris, said he was upfront with Waters in telling him that some of his records “were impenetrable.”
Godrich said that Waters — who would likely be loath to admit so himself — had struggled to “get into his groove” after Pink Floyd but had found a new creative energy.
“Roger is hugely underrated. We’ve forgotten just how good a songwriter he is,” Godrich said.
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