David Gilmour
About Face

At the end of 1982, after Waters' firm refusal to allow Gilmour time to write some songs for the future Pink Floyd album ("The Final Cut"), as well as to discuss the album's content and structure, the fruitful collaboration between the bassist and the guitarist of the group reached its lowest point, relegating Gilmour to the role of a simple session man (Gilmour would also refuse to participate in the album's production).

After such a frustrating period, Gilmour began to contemplate a solo path, writing a series of songs that would become "About Face". The critiques of the time were fairly positive regarding the music proposed by the guitarist, but relentless towards the lyrics, considered by many to be "easily forgettable and lacking great depth." Indeed, the Achilles' heel of this great musician has always been writing lyrics that match the sonic and vocal textures he offered, preventing him from ever completely breaking away, until then, from Waters' strong artistic personality, leading many to consider him an incomplete artist.
Aware of this, Gilmour endeavored to write the lyrics for all the tracks on the album but eventually entrusted the writing of the lyrics for three tracks to Pete Townshend (great guitarist and composer from The Who). Of these three tracks, one was discarded by Gilmour because the song's content, according to Gilmour, "was not at all relatable to my life": the song in question is "White City Fighting" which Townshend would later use for his solo album "White City" (the first case in which Townshend composed a song in collaboration with another artist). The other two tracks are "Love On The Air" and "All Lovers Are Deranged": the first is a good love song, far from Floydian production, with a somewhat sappy intro but a decidedly enjoyable follow-up. The second, however, is a very determined rock song, played with a good mood and strikingly engaging. The opener "Until We Sleep" is also a song with a very aggressive sound but with an almost dance-like rhythm that makes it unconvincing.

The same problem, unfortunately amplified, is also found in "Blue Light", the album's first single, which tries to be as accessible as possible to the youth of that period, but ends up in banality. The eighties were a musically fertile period, but both Gilmour and Waters failed to effectively harness certain sounds from that time, occasionally resulting in somewhat regressive outcomes (the effectiveness of "Depeche Mode" is still a long way off). However, the rest of the tracks circle around sounds more suited to Gilmour. "Murder" and "You Know I'm Right", for example, are songs introduced by a simple acoustic guitar that then evolve into a more incisive and hard sound, where Gilmour's guitar and the splendid rhythm section (Jeff Porcaro and Pino Palladino, among the best in the eighties) fit perfectly. The first of the two expresses the anger and sadness over the killing of John Lennon, an artist never personally known by Gilmour, unlike the other Fab Four. The second expresses resentment and bitterness for the way human relationships have deteriorated with Waters. A song that refutes Waters' accusations, according to which Gilmour supported Thatcher's efforts in the Falkland Islands, is the ironic "Cruise", an indictment against a military intervention that could have been avoided: this song ideally aligns with "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" from "The Final Cut".

Among the best moments of the album, we find the intimate "Out of the Blue", where, however, the lack of one of Gilmour's classic guitar solos is felt: a shame. The album concludes with "Let's Get Metaphysical" and "Near The End". The former is a splendid instrumental, "embroidered" with sweet guitar phrases, perfectly coherent with instrumental tracks like "Terminal Frost" from "A Momentary Lapse of Reason". The latter is the best song on the album, with a slow and tentative beginning, a beautiful middle section, and a thrilling guitar solo first acoustic, then electric.

In the bootleg "About Face Live", a testimony of the concerts held by Gilmour in 1984, several tracks from this album are performed and arranged in a much more convincing manner than the original versions. Bob Ezrin's production, while making the tracks smoother and more concise on one hand, made them feel less "felt" on the other. Listen to the live version of "Near The End": ten fantastic minutes.
Returning to the album in question, I can say that only at times Gilmour shows his class as a top-notch musician, and the songwriting is good but not excellent.