Anger management: Roger Waters' Is This The Life We Really Want?

We've seen it coming for more than forty years. Roger Waters has never been the happiest of souls, even when he was in Pink Floyd. He has often said that the success of The Dark Side Of The Moon marked the beginning of the end of the band, though it was a slow demise. But with their subsequent albums, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, and the virtual Waters solo album The Final Cut, his lyrics became increasingly dour, ranging from the mere cynical tone of Have A Cigar? and its satire on the music industry, to the unshackled anger about war on the Final Cut and its references to the Falklands and the Second World War that painfully robbed the infant Waters of his father.

In the solo albums since, his thematic palette has swung from melancholic reflection to outright anger, while musically rarely disappearing from the chords, tempos and song structures that manifested themselves most strongly on The Wall. But while that might be considered laziness, the familiarity actually binds Waters' de facto solo work. His first album, the much under-rated Pros And Cons Of Hitchiking contained some of his best writing, as well as drawing out some of Eric Clapton's most lucid guitar work in a period of his life when lucidity wasn't particularly forthcoming. But as Waters worked through his next releases, Radio K.A.O.S. and Amused To Death, the melancholy seemed to be taken over by a bleaker, more dystopian world view. And, in the 25-year period since that last rock album and today's release of Is This The Life We Really Want?, Waters has appeared to grown even angrier.

His epic tour of a new production of The Wall added additional targets to those the original album aimed at, including Waters' increasingly vociferous position on Israel and Palestine, on top of more familiar themes of corporate greed and state brutality. Some might say that Waters has simply become a gnarly individual in his 70s, but to be honest, he has always been so (and it shouldn't be lost that the father he so often has lamented, Eric Fletcher Waters, was a diehard Communist and conscientious objector before a change of heart saw him commissioned into the Royal Fusiliers, eventually losing his life in the Battle for Anzio).

That, then, should always be remembered as the source of Waters' pain, and his inspiration. But on Is This The Life his targets have been reset, with one Donald J. Trump drawing the most fire. This won't come as any great surprise - on tour last October and before the US election, Waters performed Floyd's Pigs (Three Different Ones) in Mexico City with projections of Trump combined with the word "pendejo" ("stupid"). Here, Waters goes further, Much further. And that is both the strength and the flaw of the album.

Musically there is nothing on Is This The Life to surprise if you've listened to Waters' past output. I don't mean that in an ill-tempered way, but there is tremendous familiarity: the guitars and string arrangements of Déjà Vu bear striking similarity to cues that ran through The Pros And Cons Of Hitchiking, and its intro also harks strongly back to Animals' Pigs On The Wing Part 1, though these might be mere background to the song's vituperative narrative about the state of the world. The Last Refugee doesn't cheer things any further, casting grey-skied reflection on, presumably, the tragic death of Kurdish toddler Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach last year. In its restraint, The Last Refugee is, in fact, quite powerful, and this reminds one that Waters - for all his inner anger is also earnest in the way he approaches such subjects. Whatever your view is of wealthy rock stars railing for causes, Waters is always totally heartfelt and, as his Facebook spats over Israel have shown, unapologetic.

© Simon Poulter 2017

The ghost of Pink Floyd re-emerges on Picture That, and not just in the staccato bassline borrowed from One Of These Days or the slide guitar so effectively used by David Gilmour on numerous Floyd songs, but in the very pointed use of the phrase "Wish You Were Here" in an arcing piece about drone strikes and the distances between those they affect and those who pull the trigger.

By Broken Bones the mood hasn't lifted much, and Waters continues to drive home his frustrations at a world and its apparent need to persist with war. But it's on the album's title song that Waters gets to the nub of what ails him. Drawing on producer Nigel Godrich's subtle touches with Radiohead, Waters lays directly into Trump ("...every time a nincompoop becomes the president...") and the unsettled world climate his election has coincided with. Bird In A Gale also bears more of Godrich's textural influence, matching it to Waters' love of putting delays on key words for emphasis, as well as drawing on samples of radio broadcasts (remember the channel-tuning intro at the beginning of Wish You Were Here?).

However, this song is where Waters' lyric writing comes under scrutiny: as someone who once described his own lines to Floyd's Breathe as "a bit Lower Sixth", it would be fair to say that Waters has written better lines than appear on Is This The Life. Some come across as too simplistic for their own good, while others appear half-arsed. With that in mind, Smell The Roses is the album's most disappointing track, with words that could easily have been scribbled out on the back of a physics exercise book, and a soundscape that even includes samples of dogs barking (yes, again, heard before on Animals), as well as the very Floydian 'boogie' that had the band themselves heavily criticised for its somewhat pointless album of improvised outtakes, The Endless River.

That, though, can be considered the weak point of the album, but there are, thankfully, many high points to compensate. The Most Beautiful Girl, with is casual downbeat, reminiscent of Mick Woodmansey's Five Years intro and tapped out by seasoned session drummer Joey Waronker, is a high point, while Wait For Me and Oceans Apart - even if bearing strong resemblance to the more contemplative moments of The Wall (such as Mother) and Pros And Cons - both present the essence of Waters' ability to create mood without screaming.

There will be those who will feel that, after 25 years since Waters' last rock record, Is This The Life could have offered greater variety. But that, I suspect, is not what Waters' fans would want. There will always be those who want, effectively, another Pink Floyd album, and musically that desire is fulfilled to some degree with this album. That said, Waters - arguably from the moment he became the Floyd's creative core - has largely used the music as a canvas on which to paint the things he believes in and wants off his chest. And at 73, he is doing that once with an album which, warts-and-all, does so honestly, passionately and sincerely. And is all the better for it.