Arriving as it did between two Roger Waters-heavy Pink Floyd releases, David Gilmour’s self-titled debut is destined to forever be compared to Animals and then The Wall — yet the album holds its own as a smaller, personal statement.
Loose and collaborative, with some interesting instrumentals, David Gilmour is recommended because it’s neither withering in the shadow of Roger Waters or (like, say, the Gilmour-led albums in the band’s third-act) trying too hard to sound like Pink Floyd. Instead, everything feels familiar and comfortable. Credit goes, in part, to David Gilmour’s backing band — old buddies who had been members of Bullitt, an early Gilmour solo group.
Released on May 25, 1978, it stands as Gilmour’s most varied offering — from a tough, ominous rocker in “There’s No Way Out of Here” to a somber and sweet vocal showcase in “So Far Away” to the closer “I Can’t Breathe Anymore,” which builds off a simple reading on isolation into a soaring guitar solo.
Of particular note is the driving “Short and Sweet.” A kind of precursor to the far more widely known “Run Like Hell” on Pink Floyd’s subsequent The Wall, this solo cut combines the sweetly romantic sound of David Gilmour’s voice and a serrated guitar edge. With “Short and Sweet,” co-written by Roy Harper (who later issued his own version of the song on 1980’s The Unknown Soldier), Gilmour has perhaps never sounded more personal.
It’s a highpoint of a project that might be criticized as comfy and never too deep, if it weren’t such a perfect platform for David Gilmour to just be David Gilmour. He was clearly at home, collaborating again with Bullitt drummer Willie Wilson and bassist Rick Wills. Of course, the pressures of working within the Pink Floyd dynamic would become far more obvious as Gilmour led the band into 1987’s Momentary Lapse of Reason.
But first, Gilmour quickly folded back into Pink Floyd, and David Gilmour — other than its minor hit cover of a song by Unicorn, above — became largely forgotten. Gilmour, Waters and Co. would return to this same Superbear Studios in France to work on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, where a leftover riff from the David Gilmour solo sessions would find a home in “Comfortably Numb.”
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Not sure it’s David Gilmour’s best, because that has been ‘On an Island’ for me since it came out, but I’ll agree on the point that its varied. I always thought some of this would have sounded really cool on ‘The Wall,’ just to break it up. There wasn’t enough Gilmour on that album for me.
One of my favorite albums!
His other two are better! I See this album and Richard Wright’s Wet Dream to be an a kind of self-confirmation for both of them that they couldn’t keep up with Roger Waters in the late 70s. When they came back in the mid 80s, they were trying at pop. Roger could have used more of Gilmour’s material if it wasn’t for the Final Cut’s (pleasingly) consistent Waters-dominated sound. Roy Harper did great (and Floydish) things with the track Gilmour gave him for “Hope” on Jugula (1985). Townshend helped pick up the slack on About Face, but neither Gilmour, Samson or Anthony Moore really consistently supply great ideas for his compositions. Short And Sweet on this album had lyrics by Harper, of course, as well.