PETER GABRIEL

Review 137!

My second favorite pop album of all time and one of the only albums that I consider perfect. (My number one is 'Breakfast In America'.) This is pop for everyone every where, anytime, and anyhow. You got soul, 80's rock, electronic, and Broadway-esque builds. Delicious. It's also surprisingly artsy. In tracks like 'We Do What We're Told(Milgram's 37)' and 'Don't Give Up', we see Gabriel at his most complex since the beginning of his solo career. We also get some surprisingly great smash hits, like every other goddamn song on the album. Amazing art pop to the tippity-top. Prog on.

It doesn't come any better than this. Peter Gabriel's haunting "Love Can Heal" is a true masterpiece. 55 years in this business, and he STILL has things to say - and does so in a way that STILL move boundaries.

He played the song live in 2016 on the "Rock Paper Scissors" tour with Sting, and again on the 2023 "i/o" tour, and now a studio recording is finally available.

The song is his reaction to the brutal murder of his friend Jo Cox, MP and mother of two small children, who was killed by an English Fascist - emboldened by the Pro-Brexit discourse of hate.

Only Peter Gabriel could create something so beautiful and uplifting on such an awful background.

I had the pleasure of hearing him play it live in May and that was even more moving than the studio version. Here's to hoping that the "i/o" tour has been professionally recorded so we may see a live release too.

"i/o" reportedly will contain 12 tracks. 9 of them have been released so far, and many of the are excellent; none less than good. This is one is truly essential; I have no hesitation in awarding 5 stars.

Olive Tree the 8th title unveiled: what to say? that I remember after attending the concert, when I felt helpless, having the impression of no longer savoring the sound of Gabriel...these trumpets, this chorus seeming to come from another album; not bad in itself it will take time to incorporate it a good thing, but too/very used, conventional and predictable; good considering his age to dare to embark on a new album that is priceless; good these brass no I will not get used to it; the prog side is off to a good start too, we are witnessing a slow progressive declension as seen for a long time and it is not the final latent attempt that will comfort me, consensual title, festive at least. .

I haven't seen the beloved family movie Babe (1995) or its somewhat darker sequel Babe: Pig in the City (1998) with a charming pig in the title role, but watching the latter surely would have given me at least one nice surprise, ie. a beautiful ballad sung by Peter Gabriel. Oh, it's actually written by Randy Newman -- admittedly it does sound like a Randy Newman song. I have a deep respect for him both as a "pop" musician and as a screen composer.

After seeing the release info here with apparently a false list of instruments (just tin whistle and brass, it says), I was all the more rewarded by the song itself. It has an elegant, delicate orchestration featuring softly played strings, brass and piano, plus a bit of Uillean pipes played by Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains. The producer Bob Ezrin has worked, among many other big names from Alice Cooper to Taylor Swift, with Pink Floyd (The Wall, A Momentary LoR, The Division Bell) from where he's probably best remembered to the prog community. The production is very pleasant.

So, Peter Gabriel's role in this song is limited to singing, but he sure sounds good on this one. The combination of the peaceful orchestration and his warm, unique voice works brilliantly. No wonder Gabe has used this rock-free approach in his own discography as well, and Randy Newman is easy to see as one of his [latter-day] influences. Newman's songwriting here is as good as always, perhaps bordering on being sentimental and syrupy but not crossing the line. This is a fine movie song indeed. If it appears at the end of the film (does it?), it would have ensured me leaving the cinema with a happy feeling.

I was sixteen when Peter Gabriel's highly succesful album So (1986) came out. I still love it, but I have never really enjoyed the very outgoing hit songs 'Sledgehammer' and 'Big Time'. The latter I can hardly stand at all, but of course 'Sledgehammer' is deservedly a classic with its innovative music video, and admittedly it isn't a bad song per se. 'Courage' is a song that existed in the recording sessions of So but wasn't finished at the time. Well, I'm glad it didn't make it to the album, because to me it's equal to 'Big Time', another noisy and funky track I would have always skipped. A quarter of a century later it was finally finished, and it was included in the 25th anniversary box of So.

The drums and bass are mixed up very loud, giving the song a heavy funk flavour and, together with the stinging keyboard sounds, an unpleasant reminder of the mid/late 80's musical era when pop music was often overproduced in a horrible, noisy way. With another kind of arrangement it would be an OK (mediocre) Peter Gabriel song. The chorus is melodically better than the rest.

On the single the same song is featured also as "The Hexidecimal Mix" which is even worse to my ears. Good grief, remember those days of maxi singles and alternative mixes?

'Courage' certainly isn't the only Peter Gabriel song I have never listened to until now. (BTW, I just listened to 'Out Out' from the Gremlins soundtrack (1984) and didn't like it either, but I couldn't write the premier review for that single since the B side track isn't available in YouTube.) But apparently I'm not losing much with these unheard rare tracks.

i/o (3:52) and the 4th single title of the next Archangel album, what's new on it? piano and basic voice, yes ok it's him, beautiful melody, the drums comes to accompany quickly; Good small explosion with the orchestra, finally the group which follows it and return behind on its 2, rather 3rd album with heat, African rhythm, ah it holds there; the keyboard is the most recognizable of this sound of yesteryear, yes it was the 80s anyway; the Zulu part with all due respect to this tune is too short; that's where the bottom hurts because we feel that it's going to end and that's a tad sad for someone who was dreaming of his extended compositions; in short, a good title without more which does not revolutionize anything in the progressive musical space.

With the release of this song, the fourth single anticipating his eponymous next album, Mr. Gabriel reveals that i/o stands for input / output, and with that ubiquitous bipolar tag he was trying to create a metaphor for the interconnectedness of everything in today's world. And accordingly, the atmosphere of the song results far less paranoid than, let's say, Panopticom, his first single release anticipating the new album.

The song begins with the singer asserting in first person his identity as an individual, and a part of everything, at the same time. That initial vocal lines come over a minimal piano arpeggio, simple but not simplistic, inviting to the honest, good natured confession that follows. And I think that's the best part of the whole affair. Then it comes the massive entry of the group, which sounds truly fantastic, of course, but it also sends us back to that well-known recipe of ethnic (african, to be more precise) flavor so present in his middle-eighties solo output. It's a nice melody, and a marvellous arrangement, but the true enjoyment you can have depends entirely on how good had you survived the saturation of the airwaves in that particular epoque. Maybe you are young, or you liked it, and now are ready for more, so it won't be a problem. I, personally speaking, have had enough of that, so the feeling I get here is rather mixed: the song opens better that it closes, for me at least.

This is really good, but I feel it fells a bit short for excellence.

Robert Fripp and Tony Levin join Peter Gabriel on his first solo album. What's missing here is other songwriters--while there are some excellent songs here, the song quality doesn't match most of his work with Genesis. It does match the weirdness--if not the quality--of his last album with Genesis, "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway." There are some nice orchestral bits here that add a lot of depth to the album. This isn't a bad album, but overall it's not amazing either.

There are some skippable songs, but there are some real gems too. "Solsbury Hill" is the highlight, one of the best songs from Gabriel's solo career. "Down the Dolce Vita" and "Here Comes the Flood" are also excellent songs. "Humdrum," "Slowburn," and "Waiting for the Big One" are good. So, three great songs, three good ones, three fillers. Overall, 3.5 stars.

Title stamped GABRIEL, I immediately think of pieces of film such as 'Long Walk Home' for this line of piano on which Peter sings as before. it's pure, his voice can still rise high, a hunting horn and I'm waiting for the chorus of the title that doesn't come; it doesn't matter the bucolic, military orchestra does its job easily and magnificently before the starting break, a solemn rise where the sound tries to gain time to stop getting old.

So if it weren't for the Archangel, we would find it good or marvellous, a hymn of a war campaign, of proven retirement or a melancholic song with a smattering of violin flights? A bit of 'Here Comes The Flood', a bit of 'Family Snapshot', a lot of love from Peter GABRIEL who still wants to speak to us by composing his hymn to life.

The problem of a single is to captivate to try to listen to even more of it; the problem of a single is also to capture the atmosphere of an album through a single title, something impossible unless you put emotion on each title; here the emotion is there with a big E.

A new, innovative title from an old gentleman who spent his prime in progressive music, then in world music.

New title with used material too, Manu's percussions, Brian's always maddening and alluring synths, Tony's bass and David's synthetic, electronic, cutting guitar; a bit of flute like in the good old days, the voices of his daughter who is beginning to arise in the group, because yes Peter GABRIEL is above all a group for the follow-up of the musicians. A mouth-watering single, whether you want or have the money to go see it in concert, or whether you want to listen to it alone at home away from it all.

Peter GABRIEL still enchants 10 years after his last album.