The Wall: Live In Berlin[2 CD Remastered]

The Wall: Live In Berlin[2 CD Remastered]

Pink Floyd's 1979 double album <I>The Wall</I> 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. <I>--Jerry McCulley</I>