David Gilmour: On An Island : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When Pink Floyd played Live 8 last summer, it was the band's first appearance in more than two decades with Roger Waters, who masterminded Floyd classics like Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. That show briefly rekindled hopes for a new album from the reunited lineup, but fans will have to settle instead for On an Island, the third solo album -- and the first studio recordings in twelve years -- from Floyd singer-guitarist David Gilmour, who became the group's de facto leader when Waters split in 1985.

On an Island suffers from the tendencies that plague all of Floyd's post-Waters works: It's a crawling headphones record that puts germs of ideas -- leaden riffs, astral soundscapes, hazy psychedelia -- where fully realized songs ought to go. To its credit, it's more inviting than the band's last two studio albums, 1987's A Momentary Lapse of Reason and 1994's song-doctored The Division Bell. Where those records mixed slick adult rock, heavy atmospherics and stodgy ruminations on interpersonal miscommunication and the fall of communism, Island merely feels like the night thoughts of a studio pro. Also, it's warmer: Slow-burners like "The Blue" are bong-ready reveries full of art-house orchestrations and impressionistic patter about moonlight and rippling water. Two sturdy rockers -- "Take a Breath" and the slyly catchy "This Heaven" -- show off Gilmour's still-vital, melodically fluid guitar work, but it's telling that one of On an Island's most arresting moments is also its simplest: the acoustic charmer "Smile," one of the rare songs free of interstellar murk and the omnipresent vocal reverb. The same isn't true of the title track, on which David Crosby and Graham Nash's supporting harmonies are processed into oblivion. Gilmour sounds like his own man here, but you wish he had someone -- anyone -- to push him beyond these new adventures in tedium.