Roger Waters
Smell The Roses

THE REVIEW

When in 2005 I reviewed Amused To Death, I speculated that it would be the passionate epilogue of Waters' career. Fortunately, I was wrong.

With such a premise, it was impossible for me to resist the temptation to write about the first new track in decades, at least if we're talking about studio album extracts. The wait of almost twenty-five years is officially over.

Waters has always been an author capable of expressing himself best through the completeness of his albums rather than hit singles, except for rare cases, and Smell The Roses does not defy the rule. Therefore, it's useless to expect radio play, aided by the fact that our man isn't very young anymore, but also due to the risk of releasing a single with an interlude of almost two minutes; to a twenty-year-old's ear, it would sound unacceptable, and since I'm not aware of a radio edit of the track, I don't think we'll hear it much in rotation. Let's not even talk about digital, while the banal last single by Ed Sheeran on Spotify is heading towards a billion listens (you read that correctly), with this single we're around eighty thousand.

Let's start, however, with the main novelty, which even a distracted ear cannot fail to capture. Waters once again winks to the entire '70s period of Pink Floyd and I would feel like saying, if the whole album were in line, that for the first time in his solo career he has freed himself from the cumbersome legacy of The Wall. That there were traces of some atmospheres from The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here was also predictable, even the former companion Gilmour has drawn heavily from them, but that our man would reuse old patterns even from the beautiful Animals was unexpected: the interlude I mentioned before is inspired by the Dogs suite. From a strictly musical point of view, the melodic line is evanescent, although it increasingly consolidates with subsequent listens, a characteristic consistent with much of Waters' solo compositions, Radio KAOS excluded. What contribution the Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich might have given, apart from the devotion we all share to our man, we will discover in the rest of the work, because in Smell The Roses you can only hear the sound of the (best) Pink Floyd.

The lyrics are in line with the quality, always extremely high, expressed by Waters over fifty years of career: This is the room where they make the explosives, Where they put your name on the bomb, Here’s where they bury the buts and the ifs, And scratch out words like right and wrong. Allusions not so vague to contemporary interpreters of preventive war. The introduction, truly irresistible, almost mimics the awkward stride of some of Dylan's blues pieces: There’s a mad dog pulling at his chain, A hint of danger in his eye, Alarm bells raging round his brain, And the