not perfect, but a welcome return to form
He lost me with his two commercial albums, "So" and "Us", which were good as far as commercially-oriented music goes, but a big step down artisitically. I'm a huge fan of Peter Gabriel's work with Genesis and up through his fourth solo album (Security). Consequently I frankly stopped paying attention. When "Up" was released in 2002 I was very interested but wary. Unfortunately my first exposure to it was "The Barry Williams Show", a song with a blatantly commercial sound and lyrics that are a hamfisted attempt at social commentary. "Sledgehammer" and "In Your Eyes" were actually quite good as pop songs (before the over-exposure), but this one is a dud. I hated it and it just turned me off completely for 2-1/2 years. Even now I consider it the one stinker that sticks out like a sore thumb. Just program your CD player to skip it and enjoy the rest! Once you get past that there are plenty of rewards.
This album, though not perfect (that would be PG#3), is a return to form. Many reviewers commented that this is an album that takes time to absorb, and I definitely agree. PG is definitely no minimalist. He spent 10 years on this, and it shows (arguably to a fault). Whereas Peter Hammill's fault might be that he releases every thought that pops in his head as a song, Peter Gabriel's arguably is that he doesn't know when to finish one. This is a DENSE album, full of the complex musical textures that are one of his trademarks. Not every song is a masterpiece (I'm now ignoring the afore-mentioned abomination), but they all have something interesting (I'm not wild about "Sky Blue", but it's not bad). The mood of the album is decidedly dark. "Darkness" starts the album off in the tradition of "No Self Control" , exploring fears that take control of oneself. The beast rears its head with a jarring burst of sound that is truly frightening the first time. The intensity climaxes with the (slightly overdone) "Signal to Noise". Some people have interpreted the lyrics to be about technology, but PG, of all people, is anything but a Luddite! To me the song has more to do with the encroaching crassness of the modern world, and with the increasing difficulty of real communication among the noise - literal and figurative. "I Grieve" deals with a distrurbing subject in an interesting way. In the middle there is a flight of optimism, before he sneaks up and bursts your bubble. (Did I dream this belief? Or did I believe this dream?) Pretty strong stuff. Even the enigmatic "My Head Sounds Like That" has a sweet melody but hints at things below the surface. The closer, "The Drop", also has a light sound with lyrics that have been interpreted in various ways.
Given that the intervals between his studio albums since "PG3"" have been equal to 2 x sequential prime numbers (2, 4, 6, 10), I can only hope that the long awaited "I/O" sees the light of day before 2016.
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Gabriel has aged, His music hasnt
Tom Petty, The Who)Peter Gabriel is in his own catagory. It was ten years since we last heard from Peter Gabriel upon this release, and most of the time when we hear from artist that havent put out any releases in the past 10 or 20 years, we usually find out that it is either a stinker (ex Boston,), or there are a few good songs, but nothing like the older material (ex. For someone that has pretty much done it all musically, both with Genesis and His solo works, you would think that there might not be anything left in the tank. Even though Gabriel has aged, his music hasnt. He proved this with "Up". "Up" is another solid Gabriel release, and to tell you the truth, this guy has never put out a bad album. Even though 1(car) and "Us" are my two least favorites, they are still good albums, but this one is far better. Gabriel hasnt given up his signiture sound, as even in 2002 he sounds like the Gabriel of old, just older and even more musically inclined. You are supposed to get better with age, at least that is the theory, yet some muscians have tried to make a comeback, only to sound stale and flat (will 80's hairbands please stop releasing new material, most stunk even then!)This is a great album, and it is just as unique, dark, twisted, uplifting, sad, and groundbreaking as "4" (Security-my all time favorite Gabriel masterpiece) Go ahead, dont be afraid of Gabriels newer material. Even though he is old and gray, the music isnt. ENJOY.
UP on a shelf - collecting dust. And that's where it will stay.
The opening track, Darkness, is one of the most grating, nails on a blackboard pieces of screech and distortion to be heard on a recording outside of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. After track 1, there truly is nowhere to go on this mess other than UP. It's not that it's boring to listen to - but that it is painfully obnoxious.
The rest of "UP" doesn't sound so bad when compared to the opening track, but none of it is particularly memorable or interesting. It sounds far too much like someone trying too hard to be artistic, and instead comes across as pompous. There's no consistent thread in these songs, but there's plenty of alternately quiet to the point of thinking your sound system stopped functioning, to drum-machine driven sonic-boom inducing loudness, on a series of poor to below fair very heavy songs. Nothing against weighty subject matter or substance in music, but Peter sounds like he's trying far too hard to sound deep and profound.
UP is, quite simply, one of the most disappointing releases from a superbly talented major artist I have in my collection. That said, I'll still look forward to Peter's next release, as I'm confident of his ability to rise from the ashes of this sonic mess.
UP .
maybe a new sort of musical direction...
It took months for me to have the consciousness to sit down and lisen to my first Peter Gabriel cd, but this cd is one in a million. Luis Mejia (son)- In my experience throughout music, Peter Gabriel was the first singer who really kept me apart from my first (horrible) experience with rap music. Being the first studio album after eleven years, Peter showed the result of time, pacience and effort. True, it's quite a change in musical style in Peter, but it shows a more personal, sensitive side of him. This is Peter Gabriel seevnth studio album and was reelased in 2002:
1. Darkness: this is one of those song that desilusionates any good hope of the cd, and it's creepy, dark and certainly the worst track he ever released. please if you're gonna hear the album, skip this song.
2. Growing Up: a popular song that is a very nice introduction for the alternative rock shown in the album. It was also remixed by Trent Reznor.
3. Sky Blue: it's said that Peter was thinking about this song for nearly fifteen years, but what was he thinking! this song is boring, without rythm, depressing and incomprehensible.
4. No Way Out: my favorite Gabriel song ever! it's true, is a very sad song but shows all that it needs to be shown in this cd, deep, emotional lyrics, non-exagerated techno arrengements, african drums, is a long song and it isn't repetitive.
5. I Grieve: being the main song of the mini series Gangs Of New York, it is a sad but greatly composed song. If you're thinking in this moment that all my sogns' descriptions are being uniform is because the whole album is uniform in one theme and almost one main structure.
6. The Barry Willians' Show: probably the only song that "gets close" of not having a sad or depressing theme. This is another one of the greatest songs in this album, telling about shows that humilliate people, make money in rating out of their suffering and shows the inhumanity in the media.
7. My Head Sounds Like That: even though it has a weird rythm, it is a nice and potent song expressed in slow rythms.
8. More Than This: another song for standing up. It has graceful rythm, good lyrics and is probably the song that gets out of the "uniformity" of the cd.
9. Signal To Noice: at first, incomprehensible, but then you find out that this song has another strong theme. It has the best music composition of the cd.
10. The Drop: a piano, 2 minute song. Not the best way to end an album, but appreciatable after all. It's the most depressing song in the whole album.
In conclussion, this is a sort of difficult album to comprehend, and if it's the first Gabriel album you've heard, don't draw conclussions about the artist. Experimentation has always been around Peter Gabriel's albums.
The Drop: Terrifying
" In my view, this song offers a close-up glimpse of what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil. A great deal has been said about this album; I wish to comment on one song in particular: "The Drop. "
On what is that conclusion based? Let's consider what we learn from its spare verses:
1. The narrator is inside an airplane, moving toward the open cockpit door, where he takes a position alongside the pilot, who is looking down, outside, "to see what lies ahead. "
2. The pilot is watching things fall, one by one. The pilot has no idea where these falling things are going to land.
3. But the question of "where they've gone" is important and consequential, because this line is repeated twice, very sadly.
4. It is evening. City lights are visible below.
5. The song emphasizes how removed the narrator is from the reality of the city below. He notices in a detached way how the lights resemble "the nerves inside the brain. " He's simply musing over this; it seems interesting (though not particularly important) to him.
6. Even though it is evening, the city lights are going OUT one by one. "You watch them dim. "
7. As the song closes, the listener should be asking a series of increasingly urgent questions: what IS falling from the plane? What kind of plane is it? Why are the lights below going out, even though we know it's evening? Shouldn't they be just coming on? (If they're going out, something must really be wrong down there. ) And why is the entire song pervaded with an eerily detached calm, even while the singing is drenched with an awful feeling of sadness and loss?
A rather obvious interpretation presents itself: the narrator is in an airplane that is dropping bombs on a city. The song lulls the listener into thinking that it is about something soft, slow, and peaceful, only to shatter this reverie with the dawning realization that the song is really about the absurd detachment and unreality of sitting peacefully in an airplane looking down at the lights of a city, while unleashing terrible violence on those below, violence that unfolds silently, even beautifully, from the point of view of its perpetrator. People are being blown to bits, lives are being snuffed out, while the agent of this monstrous act muses unconcernedly that the city's lights look like the nerves inside the brain.
I've seen dozens of comments about this song here, and elsewhere on the web, and I'm amazed at the number of people who think this frightening, horrifying song is a peaceful, soothing lullaby. It's not. It's a deeply disturbing window into the psychopathic lack of empathy entailed by technological, state-sanctioned, mass killing. The most awful part of all is the realization of how disturbingly easy it is to sit there, watching the bombs fall, knowing nothing and caring nothing about the lives below, the agony below, the death below. The listener realizes that he too could do that. At the end, when it becomes clear what the song is about, the listener realizes too that, like the narrator, he has been lulled into a state of obliviousness to an act of almost inconceivable violence - violence which, to the extent that it is visible at all, appears dreamlike, slow-motion, abstract, and lacking in meaningful consequences.
Of course, the beauty of great poetry is that multiple interpretations are possible; however, I think the interpretation of this song just offered is (a) an obvious one; that (b) seems for some reason to have escaped listeners who have commented on it here.
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