Review: David Gilmour is a sound, not a sight, to behold at the Hollywood Bowl

As far as I could tell, the smoke machines never stopped Thursday night at the Hollywood Bowl, where David Gilmour played the first of two shows to begin a brief North American tour behind his recent solo album, “Rattle That Lock.”

And put on a show the Pink Floyd guitarist did: Beyond the thick fog, which blended with a different type of smoke generated by the audience, Thursday’s three-hour concert had carefully timed lights, fireworks and elaborate video projections that I’m told were geared specifically to the Bowl’s dimensions. (Gilmour is also scheduled to perform Sunday at the Forum with a slightly different setup.)

It was all very atmospheric — and not a little deadening. Sitting in the crowd next to dudes with blissed-out looks on their shadowed faces, you recognized the visuals as a kind of sedative, designed not to excite but to lull. The vibe suggested that while his old bandmate Roger Waters has ever more happily embraced the role of the crank in the years since they were together, Gilmour, 70, is inching closer to nirvana as a comfortably numb post-hippie burnout.

But then there was the music.

Leading a large band that included three backup singers through solo material and Pink Floyd classics, Gilmour sounded thoroughly engaged Thursday, even pointed at times, as when he ripped an appealingly scuzzy guitar solo near the end of “Money.” The new album’s title track rode a vibrant R&B groove. And in “Wish You Were Here,” he did a bit of vocalese along with his guitar line that made the song feel like it might still be alive.

If I seem surprised, that’s because I was — and for more than one reason.

First, Gilmour’s inspiration appeared to have run dry with Pink Floyd’s excruciatingly dull 2014 album, “The Endless River,” which he and drummer Nick Mason assembled out of scraps left over from sessions for 1994’s “The Division Bell.”

More generally, though, I’ve seen what feels like a billion of these veteran rockers out on the road, and more often than not they’re sleep-walking through the hits their fans have come to hear. Sometimes they’re sleep-walking through their latest tunes, as well, resigned to the fact that nobody wants to hear them.

Yet that wasn’t at all the case with Gilmour, who put some welcome bite into “Us and Them” and “Time,” both from the stoner favorite “Dark Side of the Moon,” and found real feeling in “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” Pink Floyd’s tribute to its original frontman, the late Syd Barrett. He even got inside the jagged psychedelia of “Astronomy Domine,” which the band wrote and recorded before Gilmour had joined.

Songs from “Rattle That Lock” were no less vivid, particularly “A Boat Lies Waiting,” for which Gilmour brought out David Crosby to add lush but precise vocal harmony. Another new song, “In Any Tongue,” about a soldier returning home from war, came accompanied by an animated sequence depicting a brutal desert battle.

It was the night’s only visual that improved Gilmour’s still-powerful music — and a moment in which he seemed to be challenging his audience to tune in but not to drop out.

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