ON AN ISLAND

It took very little to convince me to buy this album, and so it was with great anticipation that I slotted it into my stereo and prepared myself to be blown away. On first listen, I found it absolutely, mind-shatteringly... nice. In my opinion, this album is nothing special - from a prog point of view or otherwise. It is hard to pinpoint why, however. It has all the right ingredients - jam-packed full of Gilmour special brand guitar solos, drifting melodies, the chillingly soothing (?) vocals. It just leaves me weirdly unsatisfied every time I listen to it - it is just so relentlessly mellow. No matter how hard I try, i can't help but feel my mind drifting onto other things - mindlessly twiddling with the equaliser knobs, wondering whether that little brown spot on my arm is just a spot, or skin cancer... Granted, the guitar solos are top quality and easily the highlights of the album (the first solo in the title track was the only part of the album that really caught my attention), but are sadly too few and far between to maintain the listener's interest.

So to cap off, this will be worth buying for avid Gilmour fans/curious Floyd fans/generally curious people only. Unfortunately Gilmour will not win too many new fans in the year 2006 with this effort.