AMUSED TO DEATH is no exception. Roger's third album (and his first since 1987's Radio K.A.O.S.) is a work of mood and atmosphere. Of irony and dark humor. Of bitter truths in a world where the dividing line between a football playoff and a Nuremberg rally can be a very thin line indeed.

Produced by Patrick Leonard (whose credits include Madonna's True Blue and Like A Prayer) and Roger Waters, AMUSED TO DEATH is an album of dazzling studio artistry. The new recording technique, Q Sound, gives it a sonic impact that verges on 3-D. The cast of musicians and vocalists includes Jeff Beck, Don Henley, Andy Fairweather-Lowe, Steve Lukather, Jeff Porcaro, Rita Coolidge, P.P. Arnold, and sports caster Marv Albert, The Voice of the NBA.

"Visually, the theater of the album is characterized as a gorilla watching television," Roger explains. "He's just flipping channels, looking for something that interests him. Most of the songs developed from watching television and checking out what's been going on around the world in the last few years."

"I have this sense of a lot of human and political disasters being exacerbated, if not caused, by a need we have in Western civilized countries to amuse our populations in the exercise of dramatic foreign policy. One of the things we find most amusing is to have wars in -hopefully- distant lands. It's a concern to me. To see war as entertainment on television."

The new album is framed by the painful testimony of Alf Razzell, survivor of World War I's Battle of the Somme. "They did a documentary in England about the survivors," Roger continues. "What I found extraordinary was that they've lived with the memory of that time without being able to deal with it. It's 73 years later, and they're still unable to deal with their guilt about having survived when so many of their friends were killed."

The mood of regret turns chilly in "Late Home Tonight," with its undercurrent of hi-tech menace. "If you're a fighter or bomber pilot," Roger muses, "it must be difficult not to be seduced by all that sexual energy at your control, all that shiny stuff that spits out death. There's something very attractive about it. That's what's worrying about it to me, and what the song is talking about."

Much of AMUSED TO DEATH seems to point to the Gulf Crisis, though except for one verse of one song, all of it was written long before Desert Storm. As Roger notes, however, "The way they've been patting themselves on the back and re-showing those clips of the firework display over Baghdad illustrates my point. It obscures the issues because it was exciting and amusing and allowed people in their living rooms to share, vicariously, in the thrill of the noncombatant."

"Watching TV," on the other hand, was written at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. "Individuals," Roger stresses. "That's the most important thing about the song, That's why I characterized the story in terms of the death of one woman."

As for the ultimate question addressed by "What God Wants," the answer is simple: Whatever you decide! As Roger Points out, "To break people on the wheel and torture whole communities to death in the name of God seems a little strong. We happily go into South America and, with our dogmatic interference, destroy entire tribes of people who are perfectly happy living a life where they're really close to God. Where God is in the spirits of the living things around them."

The album's title track is the only one based on pure speculation. Roger describes it as "... a cautionary tale. The idea is that somebody in a distant galaxy has seen a flickering light in the sky which is the end of the world:

And when they found the shadows grouped around the TV sets,
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists admitted that they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species had amused itself to death"

AMUSED TO DEATH is Cinema for the ears. Food for the brain. It's an album that literally unfolds with repeated play. The more you listen, the more you see.

"I'm happy to be still quite passionate about what I do," Roger Waters says. "I will be eagerly watching to see whether people get anything from it. I'm very happy just to have that individual thing between me and you, whoever you may be."