DAVID GILMOUR - On An Island

This album proves one thing above all: sometimes you don't even need to listen to a record to understand it, just look at the cover. A deep, soothing blue, Gilmour's figure in the background on a rock watching the flight of birds, and inside the booklet pastoral images of quiet, lyrical Nordic romanticism, David relaxed with friends or walking into a wood hand in hand with his wife.

He turned 60 on March 6th this year. This is no longer the time for existential psychodramas, no longer the time for madness and literature, no more walls and animal allegories.

The time has come for quiet and for retreating into one's affections, a time for serene, mature melancholy, sweetened by success, as if softened by the firm awareness of age, perhaps just faintly streaked with the subtle unease of memory.

“A Quiet Desperation Is The English Way” cantava.

A wealthy veteran of the psychic wars (a quote, I'll leave you to find the source), a survivor of one of the great adventures of twentieth-century popular music.

The album is all here, its soul lying in the subtle, seemingly laid-back semi-acoustic ballads that make up its most immediate stylistic trademark, from the almost-opening title track, a likely single, with the voices of Crosby and Nash in the background, catchy and overproduced, or like the following "The Blue", hazy, sugary, a bit soporific, or like the closing triptych of "Smile", with that acoustic guitar pointing straight back to the sound of "Meddle", of "A Pocketful Of Stones", with its syrupy strings and brooding pace, and the closing "Where We Start", perhaps the best track on the record, measured and lyrical.

In between, there's a patchwork with neither head nor tail ("Take A Breath"), a fine stab at the blues ("This Heaven") and a few instrumentals, including the metaphysical breath of the opening "Castellorizon" and the lovely "Then I Close My Eyes", almost an outtake from "More" or some Popol Vuh-style freak-out, were it not for the closing trumpet, played by none other than Robert Wyatt.

So, is this just a decent record made in the full disengagement of an aging rock star cashing in on the final scraps of his career? Maybe.

And yet afterwards you find yourself unable to get tickets for the Italian shows, all sold out ages ago, in spite of all the suffragettes of modernity and its wonders.

And yet, listening closely, beneath the surface of all this at times syrupy understatement, behind the countless solos of saturated, personality-laden guitar - these, yes, thoroughly pinkfloydian (how could it be otherwise?) - you can distinctly make out the bitter, sarcastic laughter of someone living on the dark side of the moon.

Because that, after all, is still where this record comes from.

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19/03/2006