David Gilmour On an Island (EMI) £12.99
Most people remember last year's Live8 concert for its good works. Pink Floyd fans remember it as the day Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour and bassist Roger Waters briefly buried the hatchet, sparking rumours of a full-scale reunion. But Gilmour was swift to quash the idea. He cited his age (60 tomorrow) and his current serenity working without (most of) his erstwhile bandmates as two reasons the Floyd would never fly again.
On an Island is the album he was finishing at the time. Gilmour's last solo work came out 20 years ago; the last Pink Floyd album, The Division Bell, was in 1994. The genteel lethargy of Gilmour's work-rate is matched by the sounds he crafts. Waters may be the one touring Dark Side of the Moon this summer in France, but Gilmour isn't in any hurry to cast off the past either. The lyrics paint a hazy and contented picture, exploring a similar wistfulness to his longueurs in Floyd. This album is hermetically sealed, solipsistic, muffled, a view of Gilmour's navel masquerading as a peek into the universe.
More of his digressions into folk and blues would have helped; when he takes off his guitar, he loosens up a bit. The delightful Robert Wyatt plays cornet on the borderline lovely 'Then I Close my Eyes', as mercifully un-Floyd a track as you'll find on this album. The guitarist takes up the saxophone on 'Red Sky' and manages to play it with more subtlety.
Much of the problem lies in Gilmour's instantly recognisable guitar peal, like fingernails down a chalkboard for anyone who prefers their Seventies punk rather than prog (guilty). 'When We Start' provides a warm memory of psychedelia before the rot sets in. But more fundamentally, On an Island is undermined by its own torpid insularity. The poetics of maturity and well-being are notoriously hard to pull off in rock, as recent records by Eric Clapton and Ray Davies have witnessed.
But this is something else altogether: the sound of a man of a certain age and status making music from inside a vault, numbed by comfort.
