David Gilmour - Luck and Strange

I don't want to be morbid here, but we're at a point where Rock is dying. We're all only ordinary mortal men, yes even the women and the men who are women are men, so we can't help but say maybe Luck and Strange is the last David Gilmour album. What do we hope we're going to get?

Do you want The Division Bell Part II? Part of me does, but that seems unfair. David Gilmour isn't beholden to me, he can make whatever kind of music he wants. Solo David Gilmour tends to be a lot like solo John Frusciante, if you're expecting that band they were in, then you might be highly disappointed. Then again, he is also David Gilmour, he's going to sing some dreamily philosophical wistfullness and punctuate it with several guitar solos so poignant they make you literally cry into your rum & coke and play the whole album again 3 or 17 times. Clapton can be God, as long as we all acknowledge Gilmour is 3 or 4 levels beyond the mundanity of such a paltry narcissistic deity. His wife and kids and the ghost of Rick Wright are all here, it's already like a Dickensian Christmas in September and I haven't even broken the shrink wrap yet.

Now, yes, absolutely, this is Sony money we're dealing with, but still, take note Generation Bathesda or whatever, this is what a lyric book and Side indicators look like.

Oh my aching soul, there is nothing more pretty than a haunting piano melody with David Gilmour Stratoflangering all over it. And that title track is classic Gilmour Blues over what i presume is literally random crap Rick played when David hired him back to be a session musician after Roger went off to the other side of the rainbow. If the rest of the album even halfway attempts to live up to it, then we're all getting way more than we deserve. 

The Piper's Call is what I was talking about. If all you can accept is Pink Floyd, then you won't like this, but it's absolutely 100% Gilmour doing whatever he wants, and he is totally not wrong going full on Roadhouse for a song about making a deal with the devil for eternal youth.

A Single Spark gets even weirder in a totally Leonard Cohen meets Jacob Collier kind of way. 

Yeah, the Sony money involved in reprinting the lyrics of a cover song your daughter sings is distracting, but the noir of Side A is so off the charts that who could possibly care? It totally reminds me of the LLCool J/Eminem/Q-Tip joint Murdergram that dropped a couple weeks ago. "Classic" quality makes a serious impact at the moment, because we know it's going to disappear forever very soon. There's an urgency, an electric need to get out every word before it's too late. 

Ooh, Dark and Velvet Night has that Spooky almost David Lynchian surreal quality David Gilmour does best. It's sensuous, but also rough and a little terrifying. 

Best of all, the concept isn't simply "life is a clusterfuck of luck and strange," the concept is "i hope it's not just a cluster fuck, i hope life really is as magical as what I've experienced; i hope that's the point." Personally I'm an atheist in the broadesst sense of lacking any need for an anthropomorphic creator, I adore the  clusterfuck theory of chemical hallucinations in the dark, but I can totally appreciate the sentiment of wanting the magic to be real. Not to cheapen the magic, but to heighten the reality. 

This is just an absolutely gorgeous album from start to finish. It's everything you could ever want from a Gilmour album, and more. It'll make you smile and cry and close your eyes and feel like you're hugging an old friend you might never see again because time is a tide that disobeys, and it never ends. 

I honestly didn't think anybody could outdo Tears For Fears or Metallica or Green Day in the "comeback album" department, but damn did David Gilmour just stand at the top of a waterfall with his arms outstretched as if to say "come try to get me, mofos." All the thumbs, all the stars, honestly I feel bad for anybody slated to release an album in the next 3 months. Sorry folks, David Gilmour already won, moose out front should have told you.