Roger Waters
The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux

THE REVIEW

After years of controversies, legal battles, and mutual accusations between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, which occasionally flare up again almost cyclically, exhuming skeletons now mummified, whose bones crumble at the touch due to old age, Waters decides - fifty years after the original release - to rewrite The Dark Side Of The Moon, feeling the need to offer his own acrimonious version.

In Redux, the monumental grandeur of the Floydian work is annihilated and detonated at its foundations, and perhaps that's right because it would have made no sense to offer a carbon copy of the 1973 masterpiece, of which Roger himself is the author, both of all the lyrics and much of the music.

The result is, however, a dark, tormented, dogged album, buried under the crumbled rubble of the pyramidal monolith, mumbled with the voice of Leonard Cohen caught in a lycanthropic attack in the light of the only side of the moon visible from earth. An album that strips the music to the bone to let the word prevail, also through the addition of numerous spoken interludes, but by doing so, it strips away the lyricism and magic, especially from the tracks that originally had no lyrics, like “On the Run” and “The Great Gig In The Sky.”

Let’s be clear. The tracks are almost all fascinating and it couldn't be otherwise given the level of the originals. A good song remains a good song, whether performed with just an acoustic guitar or by the London Symphony Orchestra.

However, Waters seems to want to replace himself as the crazy diamond, the alienated friend and primordial Floyd leader, Syd Barrett - who largely inspired Dark Side and later Wish You Were Here - to show us his own dark side, now that the earthly satellite has lost much of its charm. And he does it with great skill, crafting an album with elegant string arrangements and enchanting keyboard textures, but overall fatally boring.

Waters' revisionist intent is not agreeable - theoretically valid, but practically it doesn't hold up - to redraw with the eyes of the eighty-year-old, the vision of modern man's alienation that he had foretold with the eyes of his twenty-nine-year-old self, of which not a single cell survives in the octogenarian Roger's body.

Indeed, although Waters certainly doesn't pretend to replace the original work with his current reinterpretation, the idea of wanting to confront the icon of Newton's prism is flawed in itself. Masterpieces are not to be confronted with, especially if it's the author himself attempting it, because a work of art - if it has reached wide dissemination - no longer “belongs” to anyone. It has become common heritage.

A total remake of Dark Side would have made more sense - in my opinion - if it had been undertaken by someone else who wanted to create a jazz, punk, or chamber music version and who perhaps wasn’t even born at the time of the original release.

Thus, once the initial legitimate curiosity is exhausted, I think few will listen again to Roger Waters’ solitary version in place of the far more exciting Floyd one.

The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux, ultimately, is a superfluous revision.

It's the funeral march for a masterpiece.