Roger Waters – The Wall: Live in Berlin (1990) [2x SACD, Reissue 2003] {SACD ISO + FLAC 24bit/88.2kHz}

Pink Floyd’s 1979 double album The Wall was that strangest of beasts: a concept album, driven by a tortured rock-star protagonist, so obtusely personal it sometimes bordered on the inscrutable. But history was kind to the Roger Waters-spawned epic; when the communist bloc crumbled in 1989, taking the symbolic Berlin Wall with it, it inspired the ex-Floyd bassist and singer to frame his most ambitious work as another familiar tortured-rock-star conceit: the all-star benefit-concert TV broadcast. The shifting tides of history have undermined much of this remastered, double-disc soundtrack’s momentous context, leaving behind a larger-than-life spectacle that, depending on one’s viewpoint, could represent rock’s most overarching populism-or the beginning of the end. Still, the star-heavy concept yields some unexpected surprises, from the Scorpions’ bracing opening blast through haunting reinventions of “Mother” (Sinead O’Connor) and “Goodbye Blue Sky” (Joni Mitchell)-performances that blunt the oft-suspect misogyny of Waters’s sprawling tale. Bryan Adams injects some vocal fire into “Empty Spaces” and “Young Lust,” but by the time Waters, company, a massed German orchestra, choir, and the Military Orchestra of the Soviet Union reach the album’s crescendos the event has gone so far over the top that it seems like nothing short of a neo-operatic Andrew Lloyd Webber wet dream.

Tracklist
DISC 1:
01. In The Flesh (Part 1)
02. The Thin Ice
03. Another Brick In The Wall (Part 1)
04. The Happiest Days Of Our Lives
05. Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)
06. Mother
07. Goodbye Blue Sky
08. Empty Spaces
09. Young Lust
10. Oh My Gawd, What A Fabulous Room!
11. One Of My Turns
12. Don’t Leave Me Now
13. Another Brick In The Wall (Part 3)
14. Goodbye Cruel World

DISC 2:
01. Hey You
02. Is There Anybody Out There
03. Nobody Home
04. Vera
05. Bring The Boys Back Home
06. Comfortably Numb
07. In The Flesh (Part 2)
08. Run Like Hell
09. Waiting For The Worms
10. Stop
11. The Trial
12. The Tide Is Turning

SACD ISO