• AllMyVinyl #56
• Band: Roger Waters
• Album Title: The Dark Side of the Moon Redux
• Release Date: 6 Oct 2023
• Date purchased: 6 Oct 2023
• Location purchased: Amazon
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 2
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

OK, this one will be short.  I honestly considered putting a single word as my review.  “Why?”  While that was amusing, I really couldn’t.

It is however very divisive.  Most have an opinion that leans towards “Why?”  Those who actually take the time to listen to it will find something very different, yet with a tinge of familiarity though.  I mean it is still Dark Side of the Moon, just a totally different version.  It’s not going to be for everyone, that’s for darned sure.  The overall pace of music is very VERY slow here – most of the power of the original is missing.  It’s almost dirge like in many places.

One thing I really DID love is the album starts off with Waters’ “talking version of singing” doing the lyrics to an old Floyd song, “Free Four” (from the Obscured by Clouds album).

Of the other songs…  I did like what he did with Time.  Money works with the overall dirge feel of the album (that opening bass riff for sure). Us & Them is probably the closest to sounding like the original, but even that’s fairly different.  On the vinyl, the album that we knew ends after Side 3.  There’s a Side 4 which is a 13 min track which is eminently skippable.  It’s a LOT of ambient sound with a handful of parts of Roger just talking thrown in. Not sure what the point of that is.  If you saw his 2017 tour it started with half an hour of ambient sounds in the theatre with a beach scene on the screen. This reminds me of that a bit.

Of the musicians on the album, only Roger is there from the original, and he only plays bass on one song.  Nobody else in the credits was in the original – this is something new.  That includes Jon Carin, who played with Gilmour’s post-Waters Floyd, which was an interesting choice.

If you go into this expecting a minor variant of the original, you’ll be disappointed.  This is a complete and total reworking – the album is unrecognizable in places, and in others, you’ll hear enough to remind you of the original.  Which brings up the main problem.  Why does this exist?  In the liner notes, Waters gives some attempt to explain that, but even that felt a bit like “Oh come on”.  He said “Fifty years after the release of the original recording of DSOTM, I realized the fucking warmongers hadn’t got the message the first time around and I thought “Maybe I should re-record it?”  Uh, what?  How does problems with people who wage war explain the reason to re-record an entire album.  I don’t get it.

But it’s here.  It’s an interesting musical experiment, but I can’t imagine anyone besides Roger himself preferring this to the original.  Dark Side of the Moon 1973 is a fucking masterpiece.  Dark Side of the Moon Redux 2023 is something to listen to once, maybe twice and go “Yeah, OK”, and go back to the original.