David Gilmour’s ‘Luck and Strange’ Is a Sometimes Beautiful, Sometimes Chilly Dark Night of the Soul
The most intriguing song on Luck and Strange, David Gilmour’s first solo album in nearly a decade, is a dark-mirror reflection of his own artistry: a rendition of the Montgolfier Brothers’ sardonic 1999 dream-pop song “Between Two Points,” sung by his daughter, Romany.
The original song was a slow-building echo of Pink Floyd’s realism, an impressionistic portrait of failed communication and a related sense of resignation. Refracted through the Gilmours’ lenses, “Between Two Points” feels starker and uncanny, as Romany plays the keyboard on a harp and sings, “Just let them walk all over you … They’re right, you’re wrong.” Then David answers her despair with an expectedly stunning guitar solo that weeps in equal measure with the sentiment of the song and offers a few hopeful notes, too. It’s like a mature update, decades later, of how to deal with the quiet desperation he and his Floyd bandmate, Rick Wright, sang about hanging onto in times past.
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The second most intriguing song on Luck and Strange is “Luck and Strange” itself, which is presented two ways depending on the version of the album you have. The more interesting is the 14-minute “original barn jam,” which Gilmour and Wright, who died in 2008, recorded with drummer Steve DiStanislao and latter-era Floyd bassist Guy Pratt in 2007. The groove recalls the middle section of Pink Floyd’s “Dogs,” but the instrumental feels bluesier and looser as Gilmour and Wright take turns improvising their own conversation on their instruments. The album version — which is shorter and features Gilmour singing lyrics written by his wife and longtime collaborator, novelist Polly Samson — sounds more grandiose, as Gilmour contemplates mortality: “When the curtain call is done/Morning always comes.” The dogs are dead (to quote a lyric from another Animals song) and he’s hoping survival isn’t just luck and strange. If you immerse yourself in it, it’s quite stirring.
As a whole, Luck and Strange is exactly what anyone who has followed the former Pink Floyd singer and guitarist for decades should expect: a collection of meditations on the fragility of humankind with a soup?on of optimism. Gilmour, 78, and Samson, 62, interested themselves in mortality during the writing of the album, whose roots began during Covid pandemic lockdowns, when the entire Gilmour clan would gather to sing songs as the “Von Trapped Family,” and extended into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for which Gilmour reconvened Pink Floyd for a charity single. With brief candles extinguishing around the world, they wrote a succession of shadowy treatises for Luck and Strange asking what life means.
You can sense the depth of their shared questioning in his baritone singing. On “A Single Spark,” Gilmour sighs, “Say isn’t it true that it’s all through in a single spark, between two eternities,” and on the final song “Scattered,” he closes the whole album singing, “Time is a tide that disobeys, and it disobeys me … It never ends.” He shared the writing credits for that song with Samson and their son, Charlie, showing how the philosophical mood infected all the Von Trappeds. The lyrics don’t have the same toothy bite as Pink Floyd’s early work (those were mostly written by a certain ex-bandmate that Gilmour has been running like hell from in recent years), but the philosophical nature of his questioning is a throughline to his past.
For as sobering as the lyrics on Luck and Strange can be, though, it’s the music itself that speaks loudest. Gilmour has always had a knack for chord changes and guitar melodies that hit you straight between the eyes. Two instrumental interludes, “Black Cat” and “Vita Brevis,” keen and whine in ways words would fail. The closing leads of “The Piper’s Call” speak volumes in a way that the rest of the song couldn’t, and “Scattered,” which begins with the sound of a thumping heartbeat, sports one of Gilmour’s most weepingly beautiful and reaching solos since “Comfortably Numb.”
As a Gilmour solo album, it’s heavier thematically than 2015’s Rattle That Lock and earthier than 2006’s On an Island. It’s closest, in some ways, to The Division Bell, the 1994 Pink Floyd album which first featured Samson’s lyrics, notably on the doleful “High Hopes,” on which Gilmour lamented “a life consumed by slow decay.” Although some of Luck and Strange could feel overwhelmingly dreary if you stare too deeply into it, the album reveals an artist at peace with his legacy and who he has become. There’s beauty gazing into the abyss and comfort in knowing it’s looking back.
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