Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 5/10

There have been so few solo albums performed by David Gilmour that waiting for one to arrive is akin to finding the winning lottery numbers two weeks on the trot and knowing that you will share that joy with millions of others.

Yet somehow Time seems to have finally caught up with the legend and whilst the serene beauty is captured in his latest solo affair, Rattle That Lock, it is like finding yourself walking through a forest during a summer’s day and the wind playfully racing through the trees and ruffling your good spirits and your tangled hair, at night with no shelter that forest becomes a den of savagery as badgers take up arms against the trees and the wind becomes a gale, the result is carnage by morning as the forest becomes a mess that should be forgotten and locked away.

Rattle That Lock should be the best testament, the demonstration of a legend at work and the proof positive that a musician once they have achieved such lofty status, never loses the urge to perform new and exciting music, and should they do, it would be better to become the grand statesperson and quietly sit back and take one measured bow of gracious acceptance before retreating finally to the background, smiling with satisfaction at what they have left behind.

Instead what comes across is a man, a genius, of rightly held guitar God cool, who has lost the bite, who plays so damn well and who still sends a shiver of excitement of the spine but who has only the fight left in him to produce the safe and the comfortable. Music is not about making people comfortable, it is about challenging ideas, of being avent garde and interesting, of pulling something so unique out the bag that it stands the test of time and captures the soul to the point of bursting with unfathomable potential. Rattle That Lock, unfortunately and with sadness, doesn’t even blow the dust off the key, it doesn’t rattle, it barely manages to jangle and somewhere in the distant past, the thought of fans crowding to see one of Britain’s finest play one of the most sublime guitar parts ever created, slowly fades and dislodges.

This is not the way the memory of music should be maintained and whilst there are a couple of nice touches, notably in Faces of Stone and Today, the rest just leaves the listener feeling flat and heavy-hearted, as if something special from their time on Earth has slipped beyond reach. Rattle That Lock is a disappointment of average pleasure, of a dream fragmenting and the edge of anger finally succumbing to taking tea with memories dashed in every photograph.

Ian D. Hall