Dear God, this misses the boat so badly that it\u2019s insulting.<\/p>\n
Everything great about this album has been stripped away. In an effort to egotistically claim one of rock music\u2019s greatest albums as solely his own work, Roger Waters has effectively neutered both the contributions of the other members of Pink Floyd and the album itself.<\/p>\n
None of this behavior is news to anyone who follows the band, but to hear it so clearly, so brazenly, it\u2019s enough to piss anyone off. It\u2019s not like someone radically reinvented the album; there\u2019s nothing wrong with putting a spin on a classic, and certainly Dark Side<\/i>\u2019s textures and songs lend themselves to all manner of interpretation (the Flaming Lips did it in 2009, for example). But this is theft<\/i>. This is one of the original artists stripping bare an album on which he participated, removing any traces of the band that made it, adding spoken word bits and turning the whole thing into a morbid, dreary tone poem.<\/p>\n
This is not hyperbole. The entire first side is basically Waters talking, or barely singing in his lowest register, on \u201cBreathe\u201d and \u201cTime.\u201d As for \u201cOn The Run\u201d and \u201cGreat Gig In The Sky,\u201d they are now slow-moving spoken word pieces, with barely-there keyboards creating an ambient texture. There is no guitar. There is very little percussion. None of the contributions of David Gilmour or Rick Wright are here. Waters has successfully excised his bandmates (and Claire Torry) in search of putting his name on something he always felt was rightfully his. The songs just plod along, slow dirges stripped of personality, with mumbling from an old crank plastered in between the more well-known lyrics. God forbid anyone should get a solo.<\/p>\n
In one incarnation, this could have been interesting. The album starts with a straight reading of the lyrics from the 1972 Floyd song \u201cFree Four\u201d: \u201cThe memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime.\u201d Given the lyrical matter of Dark Side<\/i>, there\u2019s something intriguing about revisiting the work of 25-year-olds by a 75-year-old, by someone who has really lived. But DSOTM <\/i>was more than just about regrets; it was about madness, both the more overt kind and the quiet madness of everyday life; \u201cHanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,\u201d Gilmour sang on \u201cTime,\u201d and evidently that\u2019s what Waters has been doing.<\/p>\n
The one song where this approach works is \u201cUs And Them,\u201d which was already fairly slow to begin with; it lacks the magic of Wright\u2019s keyboards, but Waters\u2019 gravity brings a drama to the piece. It won\u2019t replace the original, but it\u2019s at least interesting. The band actually shows up for \u201cAny Colour You Like\u201d as well; ignore Waters\u2019 natterings about trade and soft skin or whatever and you\u2019ll hear traces of the original. \u201cEclipse\u201d is also played straight, albeit in the style of the rest of the songs. But there\u2019s no passion and seemingly no purpose, other than soothing whatever alternate history and demons live in Waters\u2019 head. <\/p>\n
The man obviously has creativity, and had he put out an original album about morbidity and aging and the futility of life, many people would have wanted to hear that. Nobody asked for this. One review from last week attempted to be charitable, saying that although the idea was like Paul McCartney remaking Sgt. Peppers<\/i> by himself, the execution was better than the sound. This is the minority view, I assure you, dear reader. Floyd fans will hate it. Casual fans of the better-known songs here will hate it. Even if you\u2019re brand new to everything and put this on knowing nothing about the history or Roger Waters, you\u2019ll be bored stiff midway through the first side and move on to the next album. <\/p>\n
Let\u2019s not even call this Dark Side of the Moon Redux. <\/i>Let\u2019s call it Dark Side (Roger\u2019s Version) <\/i>and pretend this has nothing to do with the original, which it pretty much doesn\u2019t. And actually, let\u2019s let the man himself speak, taken from a February 2023 interview with Waters talking about Gilmour and Wright: \u201cThey can\u2019t write songs, they\u2019ve nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy \u2026 Let\u2019s get rid of all this \u2018we\u2019 crap! We all contributed \u2013 but it\u2019s my project and I wrote it. So\u2026 blah!\u201d<\/p>\n
Right. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":34888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7138],"rating":[5620],"class_list":["post-46755","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-roger-waters","rating-rating-f"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46755"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46755"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}