ABOUT FACE

When you listen to the opening number ''Until We Sleep'', there is a serious ''Simple Minds'' feel. It is rather close to ''In Trance As Mission'' from their excellent ''Sons & Fascination'' album. It was quite unexpected to listen such a song from Gilmour though.

On the contrary, ''Murder'' is quite a traditional Floyd song. The acoustically driven opening part contrasts with the powerful and heavily guitar oriented second half. It almost ends up into a hard-rock number! This track construction is used several times on this work notably during the excellent ''Out Of The Blue'' which is again very much premonitory of the late Floyd work. A highlight here.

Still, this album holds some blunders: the funky ''Blue Light'' and the hard-rocking/AOR ''All Lovers Are Deranged'' are absolutely dispensable. Do we need Gilmour to play such . music?

Another ''great'' song is the reggae-oriented ''Cruise''. Gosh! Press next. Fortunately, with ''Let's Get Metaphysical'' the man displays a brilliant instrumental track with a splendid guitar moment. It was about time!

I'm afraid though that this is not sufficient to raise the level of this album to the three stars status, which means a good album. IMO, there are too many average songs to achieve this although ''Near The End'' holds some fine work from the master (but only . near the end).

I quite liked his debut solo work, but ''About Face'' is not at all on par. Only two stars.