DAVID GILMOUR

A very good solo album (and only topped by Roger's Amused To Death) as I am usually very wary of solo albums of group members, this ranks among the better one ever coming out of the Floyd stable. Released a few months before Rick Wright's Wet Dream, both album probably suffering from Floyd's Animals' proximity, these albums can be seen nowadays a bit differently than back then: Obviously Roger Water's concepts about Floyd's musical directions was causing a pile of songs that the other two writers couldn't use on the group's albums, so they had to do something in order to get them published. Both chose solo albums.

Short unrelated songs that are generally spreading wider than the usual Floyd spectrum, this self-titled debut is an honest one, where it's obvious Gilmour is not keeping his better material for his solo ventures (some issue often popping up in other groups), as there are no tracks of the calibre of Dogs or Comfortably Numb. Gilmour's voice used alone, without Wright's to tone it down, might surprise a bit, but you recognize the man's vocal chords immediately.

Opening on the made-for-spacey-guitar instrumental Mihalis, the mood is set for mid-tempo tracks that are more (another delightful made-for-guitar instrumental, Raise My Rent) or less (So Far Away, No Way Out Of Here, Short And Sweet) successful tracks, some being a bit haunting like No Way (into here ;o))))). A bit harder is the track Cry From the Street, where Gilmour's guitar is obviously feeling in its edgy playing the kid's cry of anguish and anger in the never-ending 70's economic crisis hitting the UK. The very Jeff Beck-like (the JR/F era) It's Deafinitely is another instrumental winner , but the album closes on the neutral I Can't Breathe Anymore, which is a bit of a miss - better save a good track for an album's outro.

Despite some of the unmistakably Gilmour songwriting ticks, I don't see much relation to Floyd music of that era (that's Animals or The Wall) or others outside of the guitar playing and the singing. Clearly this album was made like Wet Dream for two songwriters to publish their musical ideas while a third musician was hogging the group's album for his mammoth projects. Both this and Wet dream are minor works, especially compared to Water's then-works, but they have much charms and merits.