Current listening
It was the almost-perfect album So that converted Peter Gabriel from star to superstar in 1986. He released Us in 1992 and that was it, then, for ten years. Well, sort of. There was OVO, his music for the Millennium Dome show, plus the soundtrack for the film Rabbit Proof Fence and there were lots of things in between with Real World and Womad, including remarriage and fatherhood. Not much time there for recording a new album. The interlude is now over, however, and Peter Gabriel is back with Up.
A decade in distillation. Was it worth the wait? On first listening, I didn't think so. The album cover, with its dominant grey and Man Ray-like tears on an out-of-focus face, hints that there's music within which is not for summer parties. Death and Birth are subjects that demand serious treatment and both set the tone for the album. So we get music that's dense and intense with lots of soaring vocals and big piano chords. There's dance stuff as well but even that's heavy. "The Barry Williams Show" is a swipe at the Jerry Springer plague of confessional TV: "watching people bleeding and turning it into cash." We live in an age when television executives feel it proper and profitable to turn dysfunctional lives into mass entertainment. Peter Gabriel isn't willing to buy it.
Through the recordings of Real World, Gabriel has expanded our appreciation of the diversity of the human voice, be it that of Yungchen Lhamo from Tibet or Iarla ӠLionᩲd from Ireland, and he calls on his catalogue to add depth to Up. "Sky Blue" is a sonic battle and then the Blind Boys of Alabama arrive to lift the chorus onto a new plane. In "Signal to Noise" it's the posthumous voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn that gives redemptive power to the song.
Somewhat inaccessible at first, Up repays close re-listening.
