It's far too easy to lob Maginot Line analogies at The Wall. Beset by egomaniacal rockstar melodrama and a bad hangover from the incestuous breakdown tribute Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd's milestone 1979 double-LP juggled situational paralysis with Roger Waters' mounting crisis of self. Ruled by the death of his father during the Allied invasion of Anzio, Italy in February 1944, Roger Waters-- a tidy anagram for "Regret War So"-- willfully took charge of Pink Floyd's unrivaled pop music standing for 1983's The Final Cut, one of the most haunting and literal examinations of one man's psyche on record.

I can think of few pop songwriters who've delivered their diaries with enough conviction to transcend the medieval, lifeless nature of oral tradition, and I can think of only one other rock critic as touched by The Final Cut as I've been over the years. Kurt Loder awarded The Final Cut Rolling Stone's sacrosanct five star rating in issue 393, comparing Waters' gripping linear narrative to its only conceivable peer, master storyteller Bob Dylan. An unflinching, out of control spiral toward the center of paternal identity, Britain's stiff upper lip, and the idiocy of war, The Final Cut fulfills the promise of The Wall's most poignant moments, gutting sons, soldiers, and the unknowing inheritors of their sacrifices eight ways from Sunday.

It's a shallow and all too common practice to dismiss The Final Cut as "a Roger Waters solo album," and I've always been perplexed at the notion given The Wall; amid its more specific moments lay the seeds of The Final Cut, which was, as its title might suggest, originally outlined as an appendix to the film. For years now, it's seemed so obvious, perhaps only to a few, that the stretch running from "Is There Anybody Out There" to "Bring the Boys Back Home" works as a transition into The Final Cut, needlessly appended by arena rock volleys "Run Like Hell" and "Waiting for the Worms", and an overdrive rehash of the stupendous opener "In the Flesh". "The Show Must Go On" was a dead giveaway: Waters was tired of superstar bullshit, of rock and roll's stagnant decadence, and desperate to record an encompassing statement he could sign off on. Accost his aims if you must, but I fail to see how the universally lauded classic Wish You Were Here is any less "tainted" by his direction.

Rebounding from the cinematically overreaching and largely pompous Wall film, Waters strips away the infectious rock and roll clichés he'd been reinforcing, burying himself in his father's possible pasts. The Final Cut opens with one of England's most potent national anthems, speaking to her popular dejection under the Conservative cosh. Among the earliest songs to address the social unrest of the late 1970s with any distance, "The Post War Dream" is a gutting reprimand for Margaret Thatcher's oblivious aristocracy. Rising from a sound collage of industrial echoes and funeral organ, the album's first line defines the boldness with which Waters will confront his depression and disgust: "Tell me true/ Tell me why/ Was Jesus crucified?/ Was it for this that Daddy died?" Touching on the nation's apathy and decay, his opening hymn ushers its familiar Floyd explosion with the parting shot, "Maggie, what have we done... to England?"

The album begins in earnest with "Your Possible Pasts", a titanic blend of stadium rock, psychedelia and pathos, concluding with devastating imagery, "Strung out behind us/ The banners and flags/ Of our possible pasts/ Lie in tatters and rags." The raucous chorus, "Do you remember me?/ How we used to be/ Do you think we should be closer?", drifts over a somewhat predictable arrangement, certainly nothing new in the face of their defining mope-rock standard "Comfortably Numb", but a far more obvious analogy awaits, as The Final Cut's often lambasted title track is essentially a rewrite of the aforementioned classic. This author would argue it's a vast improvement, but the comparison is inescapable; you'll have to choose ranks.

The midsection of The Final Cut is Pink Floyd's most sparse and ghostly morbid body of work, interrupted by the incredible, forward-thinking rock of "The Hero's Return", a psychedelic masterpiece railing from the vantage point of WWII survivors: "When I was their age/ All the lights went out/ There was no time to whine and mope about." It contains, both in delivery and content, one of Waters' finest lines: "Though they'll never fathom it/ Behind my sarcasm, desperate memories lie."

The album's centerpiece is appropriately its most poignant moment, "The Gunner's Dream". A heart-on-sleeve funeral for his father, Waters' lyricism is at its absolute apex, delivered in a rueful, cracking plea, "Floating down/ Through the clouds/ Memories come rushing up to meet me now/ But in the space between the heavens/ And the corner of some foreign field/ I had a dream." Waters screams out to his father's ghost, "Hold on to the dream," and what could be an awkwardly domineering saxophone solo instead flows as pub draught during the wake, smelling of stale cigarettes and wilted red wallpaper. The song concludes, infamously, with Waters' unhinged outburst, "This dream is driving me insane," which decays for ten full seconds as the doleful "Gunner's Dream" transitions into "Paranoid Eyes".

A glimmering resolution of Waters' angst, the plaintive "Paranoid Eyes" and its partner "Southampton Dock" offer an understanding of servicemen you would think impossible of someone who'd never joined up. Addressing the disconnection between the field and hearth, Waters lends heartfelt insight into the difficult reentry into society: "You believed in their stories/ Of fortune, fame and glory/ Now you're lost in a haze/ Of alcohol and soft middle-age." His advice: "If they try to break down your disguise/ With their questions/ You can hide, hide, hide/ Behind paranoid eyes."

It's unfortunate, but no discussion of The Final Cut can be complete without addressing the atrocious "Not Now John", a needless slab of cock-rock showmanship full of feigned cursing and half-hearted attempts to brush off the failure of the Wall film. A shame in every respect, the song puts off The Final Cut's somber acoustic conclusion, "Two Sails in the Sunset'. A post-apocalyptic ballad needlessly interrupted by a midsection that reverts to themes from The Wall, its fine verse was more than enough, carried by the beautifully paranoid passage: "I think of all the good things/ That we have left undone/ I suffer premonitions/ Confirm suspicions/ Of the holocaust to come."

This 2004 remaster is nicely updated for the digital age. Since Pink Floyd used vinyl to its fullest, the volumes varied wildly, and, as compact disc technology was barely examined when The Final Cut was first issued, there was huge room for improvement via normalization and the reduction of tape noise. This version also adds "When the Tigers Broke Free", a leftover from The Wall used to open the film. Long sought-after by fans, and finally included on the extraneous best-of Echoes, the track nicely forestalls the explosive "Hero's Return" and makes perfect sense on The Final Cut. One of Waters' earliest and most violent battles with paternal loss, it closes with a heartrending verse, tidily summarizing the obsession that overtook Pink Floyd's mass appeal:

It was dark all around
There was frost in the ground
When the tigers broke free
And no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers Company C
They were all left behind
Most of them dead
The rest of them dying
And that's how the High Command took my Daddy from me

-Chris Ott, June 4th, 2004