Dear God, this misses the boat so badly that it’s insulting.

Everything great about this album has been stripped away. In an effort to egotistically claim one of rock music’s 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.

None of this behavior is news to anyone who follows the band, but to hear it so clearly, so brazenly, it’s enough to piss anyone off. It’s not like someone radically reinvented the album; there’s nothing wrong with putting a spin on a classic, and certainly Dark Side’s textures and songs lend themselves to all manner of interpretation (the Flaming Lips did it in 2009, for example). But this is theft. 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.

This is not hyperbole. The entire first side is basically Waters talking, or barely singing in his lowest register, on “Breathe” and “Time.” As for “On The Run” and “Great Gig In The Sky,” 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.

In one incarnation, this could have been interesting. The album starts with a straight reading of the lyrics from the 1972 Floyd song “Free Four”: “The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime.” Given the lyrical matter of Dark Side, there’s something intriguing about revisiting the work of 25-year-olds by a 75-year-old, by someone who has really lived. But DSOTM was more than just about regrets; it was about madness, both the more overt kind and the quiet madness of everyday life; “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,” Gilmour sang on “Time,” and evidently that’s what Waters has been doing.

The one song where this approach works is “Us And Them,” which was already fairly slow to begin with; it lacks the magic of Wright’s keyboards, but Waters’ gravity brings a drama to the piece. It won’t replace the original, but it’s at least interesting. The band actually shows up for “Any Colour You Like” as well; ignore Waters’ natterings about trade and soft skin or whatever and you’ll hear traces of the original. “Eclipse” is also played straight, albeit in the style of the rest of the songs. But there’s no passion and seemingly no purpose, other than soothing whatever alternate history and demons live in Waters’ head.

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 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’re brand new to everything and put this on knowing nothing about the history or Roger Waters, you’ll be bored stiff midway through the first side and move on to the next album.

Let’s not even call this Dark Side of the Moon Redux. Let’s call it Dark Side (Roger’s Version) and pretend this has nothing to do with the original, which it pretty much doesn’t. And actually, let’s let the man himself speak, taken from a February 2023 interview with Waters talking about Gilmour and Wright: “They can’t write songs, they’ve 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 … Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap! We all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it. So… blah!”

Right.

Rating: F

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