Is This the Life We Really Want?

No matter what musical approach is being explored on Is This The Life We Really Want?, it never abandons being clever and lyrically adept.

Certainly, Is This the Life We Really Want? lacks the straightforward narrative or melodic thrust of The Wall, but it isn't as somnolent as The Final Cut, and if the songs don't call attention to themselves, they nevertheless form a long suite that works as a sustained mood piece.

The music is quintessential post-Dark Side Of The Moon Floyd, but channeled by offspring: Producer Nigel Godrich brings prog-rock grandeur, multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson microdose psychedelia, Lucius alt-R&B backing vocals.

It’s also a big album: a long, sprawling epic that stretches out for it’s slightly-padded running time, but one so full of ideas and intricacies that it’s an easy album to get sucked into.

It's exhilarating in both its fury and its craft. [Jul 2017, p.114]

A final suite of three songs--"Wait For Her," "Oceans Apart" and "Part OF Me Died"--offer a more intimate perspective; a warm, optimistic coda to Waters' apocalyptic reveries. [Jul 2017, p.40]

Is This The Life We Really Want? is easily the most accessible of Waters’ solo work--a distillation in many regards of the anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-greed messages he’s been broadcasting since Pink Floyd.

Occasionally the music wells up into something noisier and more rhythmically intense; “Bird in a Gale,” with Waters’ image of a loon howling at the sea, openly echoes the trippy deep-space psychedelia of “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

Producer Nigel Godrich, no stranger to helping soundtrack world-weary malaise, keeps Waters in comfortable territory with pianos, string arrangements and acoustic guitars, along with a few unmistakably Floyd-ian arrangements.

The songs are less varied, however, tending to chug along morosely, based around similar clusters of chords to David Bowie’s Five Years, which suits the apocalyptic foreboding but can make you long for a brightly coiffed alien androgyne to come along and break the monotone gloom. ... Still, for all its solemnity, Waters is clearly in his element, even if his Indian summer might coincide with our nuclear winter.

Is This the Life’s myriad sonic references to his work with Pink Floyd suggest that Waters is comfortable with his past. The more you accept how much his past reflects in his present, the more receptive you’ll be to this album’s charms.

While the solo work of Gilmour and Waters improves with each release and suggests that each is getting more comfortable working on his own and figuring out how to work without the other, their solo albums are also a painful and tantalizing reminder of just how good the music they made together once was.

Lyrically, the album finds Waters in pissed-off older man mode and is none the worse for it.

He just sounds like a grumpy geriatric for whom age has brought little of the reflective wisdom of Leonard Cohen.