Review of David Gilmour's album "Luck and Strange"

Singer and guitarist David Gilmour has released his fifth solo album, Luck and Strange, and in its first week it took first place in the UK album chart. Igor Gavrilov I was trying to find out if there was anything on the disc other than reproductions of standard Pink Floyd figures, where the artist worked for more than half a century.

The first chords of the opening instrumental track "Black Cat" sound - and after them there is nothing left to sing. The heart of a Pink Floyd fan seizes with delight. Yes, it is them, the instantly recognizable notes of the electric guitar, the drops of liquid Pink Floyd mercury that Gilmour drops from the fretboard. The drops burn and promise a new journey into the land of long progressive rock ballads created to test the quality of Hi-Fi equipment. The title blues continues the attraction of skill and banality. The question involuntarily arises: why record another album in the style of Pink Floyd, if all the Pink Floyd albums have already been recorded, and the guitarist himself reproduces this sound perfectly at concerts? And who, in the end, do we need more as a recording artist: the inexplicable, politically driven but far from predictable Roger Waters or his former collaborator, now an implacable opponent, David Gilmour, with his bag of old tricks?

However, in 2015, on the last album “Rattle That Lock”, David Gilmour gave out several numbers close to genius beyond the Pink Floyd standard. A great composer, he showed himself in funk, pop-rock, chanson, and folk. Gilmour’s skills still extend far beyond the boundaries frozen in the listener’s imagination. Fortunately, his wife Polly Samson is in charge. Starting with the album “On An Island” (2006), she helps Gilmour with lyrics. His children, daughter Romani and son Gabriel, helped with vocals. And another son, Charlie, is the co-author of the song “Scattered”.

The atmosphere of a family dinner is felt in the tracks "A Piper's Call" and "A Single Spark". The coziness of "A Piper's Call" is off the charts, the song is written in the tradition of warming Christmas ballads by Paul McCartney. And the finale of the composition is conceived as an instrumental jam, rolling in waves onto an unknown ocean shore. "A Single Spark" is almost a tango at its core. It grows into traditional blues and finishes with a soft ambient coda. The middle of the album is an echo of Pink Floyd's meditative last album "The Endless River" and David Gilmour's joint disc with The Orb "Metallic Spheres".

The female voice on "Between Two Points" is Romany Gilmore, who was commissioned by her father to sing the only other song on the album. The track was first released on the debut album of the now-forgotten Montgolfier Brothers.

On "Dark and Velvet Nights," David Gilmour turns to fast-paced, slashing guitar riffs and sings in his lowest register. It's like a return from the realms above to earth, a boogie with disco strings.

Critics describing the album study the seams between the Pink Floyd tradition, Caribbean motifs and production by Charlie Andrew, known for his collaboration with electronic musicians Alt-J. And all this is packaged in a design by the legendary photographer Anton Corbijn (the photo on the cover of "Luck and Strange" is subconsciously recognizable as an image from the Depeche Mode universe). David Gilmour assures interviewers that Charlie Andrew was as far away from Pink Floyd references as possible during his work. Perhaps the most striking example of combining the incompatible on the album is the seven-minute song "Scattered", in which Roger Eno's atonal piano solo is adjacent to the author's extended guitar period preceding the final verse.

While Roger Waters is losing the race for the agenda, getting involved in discussions on the Palestinian or Ukrainian theme and inevitably losing the quality of music, his former colleague allows himself the most daring games with form and content. Each of the new songs has something recognizable and even secondary. And each has something he has not done before. Pretending to be a pensioner in a deck chair on board a cruise liner, he does not restrain himself in either experimentation or improvisation.