Four years after the release of what had been Waters’ sole creative vision in The Final Cut, Pink Floyd’s existence was at best a fragmented and embittered shadow of the force it had been only a decade earlier. The year was 1987, and though Waters had officially announced his departure from the band two years earlier having felt that Pink Floyd was exhausted creatively, the man who’d long been the primary creative force behind the band was unequivocally resistant to the band continuing on in his absence. Before chalking up that move to rock star arrogance, it’s important to note the cruel irony such a situation would likely present for Waters, whose thematic obsession with the corruption and tyranny of Westernized patriarchy was now being fully manifested in the legal battle to protect the name of the band he’d spent the majority of his life so far helping to establish.

Despite the legal threats from both sides of the Pink Floyd spectrum, Gilmour along with Mason and Wright began working on what would eventually become A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. Mired in the same familiar and somewhat clichéd nuance of a band in the throes of nearly supernatural stardom attempting to work together as a singular creative force, Pink Floyd’s remaining members created an excellent rock and roll record with A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, albeit one glaringly absent the sneering cynicism and epic vision of Waters. It’s not that the album fails because of the void left by Waters, but that its relationship to the rest of Pink Floyd’s catalogue is obviously one wholly removed from the central themes both musically and lyrically established by the band up to that point.

Recorded primarily on Gilmour’s houseboat Astoria, the number of musicians credited on the album would easily rival a small orchestra — a fairly new and somewhat overwrought departure for a band that had up to that point been able to capture the epic scale of its production using its primary members and a handful of other studio musicians. For legal reasons, Wright’s own official status as a member of Pink Floyd would be relegated to studio musician, with his presence likely serving more as a legal safety net than as a crucial component to the album’s creation. Even Mason’s own contributions to the album were minimal simply due to the fact that the drummer had been somewhat out of practice. Much like The Final Cut had found Waters essentially creating a solo record masking itself as a new Pink Floyd album, Gilmour would do the same just four years later with the ten tracks on A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

That isn’t to say that the album is lacking in terms of Gilmour’s distinctive lonesome blues sound as the guitar solo on “On The Turning Away” is easily one of his finest. Though the absence of the band’s characteristically theme-focused creative vision might seem as offering less of a distraction, that lack of congruence works against the album as a whole, despite the handful of outstanding individual tracks. “Yet Another Movie” along with its complementary instrumental track “Round And Around” most closely resembles those progressive orchestration techniques from Pink Floyd’s mid-’70s output. Conversely, the hugely successful “Learning To Fly” fully taps into the razor sharp slickness of ’80s production at its glossiest.

Gilmour’s foray into the political disenchantment of his former bandmate on the song “The Dogs Of War” succeeds in so much that it underscores the guitarist’s penchant for composing songs in such a way that builds on a melodic foundation and into a climactic lead out. While the song’s bleak lyrical suggestions are in line with what the band had capitalized on over the bulk of their career in the wake of Barrett’s departure, it and the album as a whole lacks the sneering cynicism of Waters. As a collection of excellent David Gilmour songs, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason works on nearly every level. As a Pink Floyd album, it shows the delicate but no less powerful force that came with all four musicians working in solidarity.

Much like Ummagumma, the album’s faults come in the form of its fragmentation. Both Gilmour and Waters managed to produce outstanding solo work in their own right of course, but the Pink Floyd sound is not one easily patched together, much less in the midst of ego-stroking and legal caterwauling. That said, the album is impressive as a collection of rock songs from the man who, along with Waters, had created an entire world balancing itself just between the utter darkness and ethereal light just as the edges of the world it inhabited.