David Gilmour and his recently re-cast Pink Floyd nemesis Roger Waters couldn’t be on more different musical paths right now. While Waters has raced directly from his highly political This Is Not a Drill tour to the alt. media barricades of the Israel-Palestine conflict, sonically Gilmour – on this fifth solo album, his first in nine years – is to be found lounging on the deck of a cruise ship ruminating on his Floyd past, the nature of mortality and life under lockdown.
For the more precise studio craftsmen, lockdown albums are still filtering out, and Luck And Strange is among the most broad-themed of the genre. It’s something of a family affair – Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson writes most of the lyrics, son Charlie contributes words to Scattered, and daughter Romany sings on Between Two Points – and its songs are long stewed in discussions chez Gilmour around the pandemic and matters beyond.
While Sings might be a direct portrait of the couple’s reflective covid period, other tracks speak of the wandering seventy-something mind in solitude. A Single Spark questions the concepts of religion when life is such a brief flicker ‘between two eternities’. Scattered concerns ‘these days slowing down’ as the end shuffles inevitably closer.
On the smoky blues title track, inspired by the Ukraine war outbreak, he reaches rare heights of vocal passion as he considers the luck of reaching adulthood in Cambridge as one of Floyd’s ‘six-string masters of an expanding universe’, all during a ‘one-off peaceful golden age’ that will inevitably end. Between Floyd-like bookends the silvery instrumental Black Cat and Scattered, with its heartbeat backing, Pompeii keyboard tinkles and grandiose orchestral climaxes, much of Luck And Strange is imbued with tropical, fado or flamenco vibes, as if recorded in a hammock on a private beach somewhere.
The Piper’s Call, about the Faustian pacts humanity makes with hedonism and climate collapse eventually becoming tragically due, evolves from such languid places to powerful peaks of much grace and squeal. A Single Spark resembles a cruise around the more idyllic corners of the ghost dimension, with its angelic choirs and cabaret groove.
Dark And Velvet Nights has a darker, swampland voodoo tone, as Gilmour’s ever-stunning guitar work shifts from airy to earthy. It’s a natural retirement-age evolution from Floyd’s sumptuous rock (particularly, perhaps, with Alt-J’s producer Charlie Andrew on board) and Gilmour’s songwriting remains largely unweathered. Bleakness sparkles.
