Peter Gabriel - UP - worth the wait...
09-05-02, 09:38 PM
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Peter Gabriel - UP - worth the wait...
Mr. Gabriel, I'm so sorry I doubted you during this long gap.
I was a bad boy today. I exploited my workplace's T1 data line and got your album early. I promise I'll buy a legit copy with my very limited discretionary income.
You made a much better album than US. You made an album on the level of SO, PG3 ("Melt") and "Security." You decided to delve into some very dark places thematically, for which I am grateful. You displayed the sonic mastery and diversity that we love you for.
If I could have played it louder, at a higher bitrate and on better speakers, I probably would have done something very 'unmanly' in my face-region as far as office behavior is concerned. Curse them for having no CD burners, for I only have memories of the songs now...
Thanks for still making music, and don't ever make us wait this long again (you already have a few B-sides including a smokin' tune called Burn You Up, Burn You Down, and another more-than-half-finished album planned for the next 2-year window supposedly...we hope...).
I was a bad boy today. I exploited my workplace's T1 data line and got your album early. I promise I'll buy a legit copy with my very limited discretionary income.
You made a much better album than US. You made an album on the level of SO, PG3 ("Melt") and "Security." You decided to delve into some very dark places thematically, for which I am grateful. You displayed the sonic mastery and diversity that we love you for.
If I could have played it louder, at a higher bitrate and on better speakers, I probably would have done something very 'unmanly' in my face-region as far as office behavior is concerned. Curse them for having no CD burners, for I only have memories of the songs now...
Thanks for still making music, and don't ever make us wait this long again (you already have a few B-sides including a smokin' tune called Burn You Up, Burn You Down, and another more-than-half-finished album planned for the next 2-year window supposedly...we hope...).
09-05-02, 09:57 PM
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9/24, and hopefully solid. There are still rumblings about tracklisting changes and final tweaking before replication...good lord, PG is giving 'sonic perfectionism' a new definition 
09-06-02, 10:17 AM
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Hmmm. Curiouser and curiouser.
Rolling Stone essentially just panned it - giving it the rare (for a music veteran of the caliber of Gabriel) 2 star review.
Methinks this will be in the divisive "love it" or "hate it" category.
P.S. And what's with Peter's gnome makeover? Add a red hat and he could be the coverboy for coffee table whimsy.
Rolling Stone essentially just panned it - giving it the rare (for a music veteran of the caliber of Gabriel) 2 star review.
Methinks this will be in the divisive "love it" or "hate it" category.
P.S. And what's with Peter's gnome makeover? Add a red hat and he could be the coverboy for coffee table whimsy.
09-06-02, 11:03 AM
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PG really take long breaks between albums. True, his music is an acquired taste with a love it or hate it vibe. Definitely not material today's mainstream music audience buys.
However, the same was said for Springsteen and the E Street Band, and last I checked their album was still at the top.
However, the same was said for Springsteen and the E Street Band, and last I checked their album was still at the top.
09-06-02, 11:14 AM
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grunter,
Rolling Stone are the absolute cretinous swine of music criticism. You should know that. They wouldn't know a great album by an established artist if it bit them on the ass. That review of UP was also the most perfunctory and superficial review I have ever yet had the displeasure of reading in their toilet-roll-with-binding excuse for a music rag.
Remember, these are the people who gave Mick Jagger's recent solo embarassment five stars, and have afforded 3 1/2 stars-plus to several candy-pop acts and MTV whores of recent times. Fudge'em.
Rolling Stone are the absolute cretinous swine of music criticism. You should know that. They wouldn't know a great album by an established artist if it bit them on the ass. That review of UP was also the most perfunctory and superficial review I have ever yet had the displeasure of reading in their toilet-roll-with-binding excuse for a music rag.
Remember, these are the people who gave Mick Jagger's recent solo embarassment five stars, and have afforded 3 1/2 stars-plus to several candy-pop acts and MTV whores of recent times. Fudge'em.
09-06-02, 11:39 AM
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Yes, I'm well aware that the Seagram's/A&F/MGD ad circular masquerading as a music periodical that I habitually subscribe to (generally out of a genuine lack of any other Stateside music periodicals worth two shakes of a gundark's tail) isn't exactly the pinnacle of music criticism.
But I was actually quite shocked that "UP" didn't get the perfunctory 3 star review in Rolling Stone. I swear I have whole issues of Rolling Stone where every single review for every single act (regardless of genre) is 3 stars.
But I was actually quite shocked that "UP" didn't get the perfunctory 3 star review in Rolling Stone. I swear I have whole issues of Rolling Stone where every single review for every single act (regardless of genre) is 3 stars.
09-06-02, 01:20 PM
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I heard most of the album on an airplane this week. I liked it, although it didn't seem to have any of the upbeat hit sigle tracks like Sledgehammer or Steam.
I have a feeling that no matter how good this album is, it will sell very poorly. He's been out of the limelight for a very, very long time and I doubt many consumers will be clammoring for this album. I could be wrong, though.....
I have a feeling that no matter how good this album is, it will sell very poorly. He's been out of the limelight for a very, very long time and I doubt many consumers will be clammoring for this album. I could be wrong, though.....
09-07-02, 12:39 AM
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The Barry Williams Show video (directed by Sean Penn, complete with cameo by Mr. Greg Br...I mean, Barry Williams) is available to download here:
http://home.hetnet.nl/~beens99/Index%20genesis.htm
And at PG's moonclub if you have desire to explore or a fast connection to 'stream' the video:
http://www.petergabriel.com/moonclub/
Who says you can't teach an aging art-rockstar new tricks?
http://home.hetnet.nl/~beens99/Index%20genesis.htm
And at PG's moonclub if you have desire to explore or a fast connection to 'stream' the video:
http://www.petergabriel.com/moonclub/
Who says you can't teach an aging art-rockstar new tricks?
09-20-02, 06:18 PM
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Hm... early reviews coming in aren't great. They ain't BAD, but they're definitely lukewarm (Blender, The Oregonian newspaper out here in Portland). Of course, all along I've really tried to scale my expectations back. I don't think there's any "excuse" for waiting 10 years between albums, not that PG "owes" us anything, so I'm certainly not waiting on the edge of my seat for this like it were the Second Coming -- I'll settle for decent, moody Gabriel and not expect "So, Part II." Oh well, we'll all see Tuesday!
09-20-02, 09:27 PM
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Don't trust the critics, trust your own ears. Music "culture" now is completely out of step with Gabriel, while borrowing heavily from many of his innovations. Albums of his which were panned in the past have really aged much better than the criticism of them.
There are several good or excellent reviews of the disc out as well--Amazon.com, Q Magazine (4 of 5) to name just 2 of them.
My opinion as stated above--this is his best work in more than 10 years, or possibly even longer. I am looking forward to this coming Tuesday.
There are several good or excellent reviews of the disc out as well--Amazon.com, Q Magazine (4 of 5) to name just 2 of them.
My opinion as stated above--this is his best work in more than 10 years, or possibly even longer. I am looking forward to this coming Tuesday.
09-24-02, 12:13 AM
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10am, Best Buy, tomorrow. 
Some reading material:
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/revie...iel/index.html
Old men take longer
At long last, Peter Gabriel releases a new record. Is it worth the wait? If you have to ask you're missing the point.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jonathan Kiefer
Sept. 24, 2002 | While Peter Gabriel works on his songs, the people most likely to listen to them graduate from high school and college, get married, change homes and careers and sometimes politics, lose parents, let old friends slip away and make new ones, have children, get divorced, remarry or not and otherwise do away with large chunks of their lifespans.
They wait for his next album to be released. Maybe once in a while they check the Internet to see how it's coming. If the chance arises, they ask him. Gabriel hedges. Apropos of his time-tested creative method, he experiments with various excuses: "Deadlines are things that we pass through on the way to finishing"; "We're intending to release in September ... you see I never specify the year"; "Speed is not my strength, diversions are." He tweaks and mixes and masters until finally he has achieved a polished, succinct quip: "Old men take a little longer to get Up."
"Up" is Gabriel's latest "song-based" studio album, which has been a work in progress for the past decade. It is fair to call that a long time -- long enough, actually, to wonder if it is also fair for him to take so long. It's not that Gabriel has been drunk or depressed (well, who knows, maybe he has) or uninspired or lazy. He has been preoccupied. Gabriel is a distractible perfectionist, which amounts to a kind of purgatory for anyone who lives a public life, let alone a creative one. On one hand, his plate is filled with ambitious undertakings: the Real World record label, the interactive multimedia projects, the Womad (World of Music, Arts and Dance) festivals, the film scores, the family, the elusiveness. And on the other hand, the songs just weren't bloody ready until now, damn it.
With his cerebral, hyperfussy attention to detail, his protracted creative gestation periods ("I always get pregnant when I make records," he says) and his tendency to hole up in the English countryside, Gabriel seems bent on becoming the Stanley Kubrick of popular music. Maybe that's not fair -- it's not that Gabriel has come to resent his audience. He just doesn't have qualms about jerking them around. What should be an unacceptable risk in today's pop world has become an essential part of Gabriel's weirdly arty integrity.
Each new album is like a comeback; for his fans, it's like a loyalty oath. Some are willing to wait the mean times out, tiding themselves over on the "expanded packaging" of remastered early work, plus the occasional live album, hits compilation, film soundtrack or audiovisual millennium event. Others try not to indulge him, because they figure he gets plenty of indulgence from himself. Yet wherever and whenever Gabriel resurfaces, there they'll be. Just how did the masked, stage-frightened lunatic from Genesis, Holy Mother of all prog-rock, become an auteur of pop-fan anticipation?
Well, gradually. Gabriel has always been a successful patience-tester. In 1975, just as Genesis, founded by Gabriel with a few high school friends, started gathering mainstream credibility (which is not to say accessibility), the band's fickle frontman abandoned it. He got right to work on a solo album, but took two years to make it available.
People liked it anyway.
As the downtime between Gabriel's subsequent albums grew -- a year, two, four, six and now, 10 -- so did his stature, and yes, the quality of the work. Time has allowed Gabriel to assimilate his interests and influences by trying them on and flapping around in them, like the wacko costumes he used to wear onstage with Genesis. You must understand: It takes a while to reconcile '60s R&B, rock, gospel, synthy British new-wave, avant-garde digi-pop, cyberpunk and the sprawling and gorgeous musical traditions of Africa, South America and the Indian subcontinent, with dignity and without compromise.
He has vented menacing and paranoid personal nightmares like "I Don't Remember" and "Shock the Monkey," sung the range of his politics, from the raw simplicity of "Biko" to the bemused, cheekily demented Kindergartenpolitik of "Games Without Frontiers" to the elegant, utterly convincing empathy for working-class doubt and defeat in "Don't Give Up." The audacious R&B throwback "Sledgehammer" and the quintessential mix-tape valentine "In Your Eyes" helped send "So" to triple-platinum in 1986, and earned Gabriel a huge, international fan base -- to be kept waiting, again, for the tender, fierce and musky confessionals of 1992's "Us."
Somewhere along the line, a protective precedent was established for the reception of a new Peter Gabriel album: If you're disappointed, you're missing the point. Elapsed time having mooted the standards of previous work, new entities should be judged primarily for the happy surprise of their newness, and the avoidance of repetition. Success means you'll actually want to know, "Where's he going with this?"
Most of the songs on "Up" are in the six-to-seven-minute range, and they luxuriate in that extra time, shirking the confines of radio friendliness, methodically unfurling their hooks and hang-ups, false starts and stops, shifting grooves and shimmering open spaces. The music describes something weary and wounded, but in a committed, energetic way. Wearing Gabriel's accumulated experience and confidence well, the album moves very comfortably in a low gear.
It has its share of familiar pleasures, sure: the pristine production, the fine orchestration, the great hooks and greater dynamic range. The adventure of the liner notes, with all that percussion, programming, additional percussion, additional programming, guest artists and exotic instruments. Here, in addition to his usual array of conventional instruments, Gabriel himself takes on the "Wonky Nord" and "Mutator," perhaps because only he knows how to play them. But he knows his limitations too, and leaves the "Supercollider Drum Programming" and "Middle Section Backwards Piano" to others (Chris Hughes and Mitchell Froome, respectively). Mainstays like guitarist David Rhodes, who creates entire atmospheres from single notes; prowling, primal bassist Tony Levin; and the fleet soul-clockwork drummer Manu Katche perform their duties with the usual panache.
"Up" opens into a song called "Darkness," which sets the album's tone and is perfectly dreamlike, slipping easily between what feels first like the churning bowels of some fitful, sinister machine and then the aural expanse of moonless midnight in an exotic garden. It echoes some of Gabriel's earlier work, and to make matters more eerie, some of its chord changes and melodic turns seem to channel John Lennon (this happens again, amazingly and to good effect, in "My Head Sounds Like That").
The loping, lashing commentary of "The Barry Williams Show," told through a put-upon and endearingly contemptible tabloid TV sleaze-monger, is bitterly funny and certainly on target: "Before the show we calm them/ We sympathize, we care/ And the hostile folks we keep apart/ Till the red light says 'On Air.'" Luckily for Gabriel, it doesn't matter how late these observations are because they're still true -- and, for that matter, because the song's deep-digging groove is timeless.
Gabriel's greatest achievement is that his technical sophistication actually encourages a fully organic and man-made sound. For all of the album's well-tempered machinery, you can still hear fingers on a fretboard or drumskins, feet on piano pedals, drawn breath and, of course, voices. If you want to read the lyrics, you'll need a Web browser. But you can always just listen.
The penultimate track, "Signal to Noise," comes closest to making a mission statement, and you don't have to be a tech-geek to get it: "All the while the world is turning to noise/ Oh, the more that it's surrounding us/ The more that it destroys/ Turn up the signal/ Wipe out the noise."
Beyond reiterating his cultural critique in broader strokes, this seems to confirm that Gabriel's impassioned embrace of the information age has taken a toll on his attention span. Yet he somehow maintains his curiosity and stamina. There's a note of hard-won hope in this song (begun, perhaps, in the lovely and poignant outward reach of the previous track, "More Than This"), and then a crescendo to a perfectly planned collision and synthesis of Western and non-Western music. The result is everything you'd expect from Gabriel, even though you're not supposed to be expecting anything, and maybe the uppest thing about "Up."
He quickly recovers. The album's coda, a rending modernist piano ballad called "The Drop," has lines like this: "One by one/ You watch them fall/ No idea where they're going/ But down."
Observers have noted that Peter Gabriel often weighs his words with great and quiet care before speaking them. In conversation it seems like a sign of respect, and maybe that's the idea with the music too. An album every year -- even were he able to do it -- might be too much.
For those of us who work under regular deadline pressure (and when you think about it, don't we all?), Gabriel's modus operandi is infuriating and enviable. He routinely tells interviewers how easy it is for him to start things and how hard it is to finish them. Plenty of us have been there, but of course we haven't had interviewers or fans to explain it to.
While waiting to find out what was up with "Up," inquisitors resorted to cornering and demanding answers from Gabriel's colleagues, like bassist Tony Levin, online. Levin could only shrug; their guess was as good as his. He said that he distinctly remembered laying down a good hundred-plus tracks, thinking they sounded great, and leaving without knowing when he'd ever hear them again, waiting for the call to let him know when the tour would start.
Daniel Lanois, the co-producer, arranger and fellow detailer of the supremely nuanced "So," has observed that Gabriel would be better off recording his albums in the middle of the desert, where distractions could be minimized.
Could they? Gabriel -- the designer of "interactive experiences," bona fide conceptual art fabulist, farmer of high technology and, when he gets around to it, songwriter -- still nurses his dream projects, like, for instance, the ultimate 21st-century theme park, full of "the handmade, the high-tech, and the natural as much as the digital."
Musically, Gabriel has indeed taken to behaving like an experimental architect -- mulling over the basic problems of form, function, civic usefulness, spectacle, the balance of tradition and innovation -- but one who still appreciates comfortable living, thank God. The feng shui in his songs has only improved over the years. Which is why his most dedicated fans feel rewarded for following him anywhere.
If at first "Up" doesn't seem entirely worth the wait, take its maker's example and give it time. You may have to. Who knows when we can expect the next one.
Some reading material:
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/revie...iel/index.html
Old men take longer
At long last, Peter Gabriel releases a new record. Is it worth the wait? If you have to ask you're missing the point.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jonathan Kiefer
Sept. 24, 2002 | While Peter Gabriel works on his songs, the people most likely to listen to them graduate from high school and college, get married, change homes and careers and sometimes politics, lose parents, let old friends slip away and make new ones, have children, get divorced, remarry or not and otherwise do away with large chunks of their lifespans.
They wait for his next album to be released. Maybe once in a while they check the Internet to see how it's coming. If the chance arises, they ask him. Gabriel hedges. Apropos of his time-tested creative method, he experiments with various excuses: "Deadlines are things that we pass through on the way to finishing"; "We're intending to release in September ... you see I never specify the year"; "Speed is not my strength, diversions are." He tweaks and mixes and masters until finally he has achieved a polished, succinct quip: "Old men take a little longer to get Up."
"Up" is Gabriel's latest "song-based" studio album, which has been a work in progress for the past decade. It is fair to call that a long time -- long enough, actually, to wonder if it is also fair for him to take so long. It's not that Gabriel has been drunk or depressed (well, who knows, maybe he has) or uninspired or lazy. He has been preoccupied. Gabriel is a distractible perfectionist, which amounts to a kind of purgatory for anyone who lives a public life, let alone a creative one. On one hand, his plate is filled with ambitious undertakings: the Real World record label, the interactive multimedia projects, the Womad (World of Music, Arts and Dance) festivals, the film scores, the family, the elusiveness. And on the other hand, the songs just weren't bloody ready until now, damn it.
With his cerebral, hyperfussy attention to detail, his protracted creative gestation periods ("I always get pregnant when I make records," he says) and his tendency to hole up in the English countryside, Gabriel seems bent on becoming the Stanley Kubrick of popular music. Maybe that's not fair -- it's not that Gabriel has come to resent his audience. He just doesn't have qualms about jerking them around. What should be an unacceptable risk in today's pop world has become an essential part of Gabriel's weirdly arty integrity.
Each new album is like a comeback; for his fans, it's like a loyalty oath. Some are willing to wait the mean times out, tiding themselves over on the "expanded packaging" of remastered early work, plus the occasional live album, hits compilation, film soundtrack or audiovisual millennium event. Others try not to indulge him, because they figure he gets plenty of indulgence from himself. Yet wherever and whenever Gabriel resurfaces, there they'll be. Just how did the masked, stage-frightened lunatic from Genesis, Holy Mother of all prog-rock, become an auteur of pop-fan anticipation?
Well, gradually. Gabriel has always been a successful patience-tester. In 1975, just as Genesis, founded by Gabriel with a few high school friends, started gathering mainstream credibility (which is not to say accessibility), the band's fickle frontman abandoned it. He got right to work on a solo album, but took two years to make it available.
People liked it anyway.
As the downtime between Gabriel's subsequent albums grew -- a year, two, four, six and now, 10 -- so did his stature, and yes, the quality of the work. Time has allowed Gabriel to assimilate his interests and influences by trying them on and flapping around in them, like the wacko costumes he used to wear onstage with Genesis. You must understand: It takes a while to reconcile '60s R&B, rock, gospel, synthy British new-wave, avant-garde digi-pop, cyberpunk and the sprawling and gorgeous musical traditions of Africa, South America and the Indian subcontinent, with dignity and without compromise.
He has vented menacing and paranoid personal nightmares like "I Don't Remember" and "Shock the Monkey," sung the range of his politics, from the raw simplicity of "Biko" to the bemused, cheekily demented Kindergartenpolitik of "Games Without Frontiers" to the elegant, utterly convincing empathy for working-class doubt and defeat in "Don't Give Up." The audacious R&B throwback "Sledgehammer" and the quintessential mix-tape valentine "In Your Eyes" helped send "So" to triple-platinum in 1986, and earned Gabriel a huge, international fan base -- to be kept waiting, again, for the tender, fierce and musky confessionals of 1992's "Us."
Somewhere along the line, a protective precedent was established for the reception of a new Peter Gabriel album: If you're disappointed, you're missing the point. Elapsed time having mooted the standards of previous work, new entities should be judged primarily for the happy surprise of their newness, and the avoidance of repetition. Success means you'll actually want to know, "Where's he going with this?"
Most of the songs on "Up" are in the six-to-seven-minute range, and they luxuriate in that extra time, shirking the confines of radio friendliness, methodically unfurling their hooks and hang-ups, false starts and stops, shifting grooves and shimmering open spaces. The music describes something weary and wounded, but in a committed, energetic way. Wearing Gabriel's accumulated experience and confidence well, the album moves very comfortably in a low gear.
It has its share of familiar pleasures, sure: the pristine production, the fine orchestration, the great hooks and greater dynamic range. The adventure of the liner notes, with all that percussion, programming, additional percussion, additional programming, guest artists and exotic instruments. Here, in addition to his usual array of conventional instruments, Gabriel himself takes on the "Wonky Nord" and "Mutator," perhaps because only he knows how to play them. But he knows his limitations too, and leaves the "Supercollider Drum Programming" and "Middle Section Backwards Piano" to others (Chris Hughes and Mitchell Froome, respectively). Mainstays like guitarist David Rhodes, who creates entire atmospheres from single notes; prowling, primal bassist Tony Levin; and the fleet soul-clockwork drummer Manu Katche perform their duties with the usual panache.
"Up" opens into a song called "Darkness," which sets the album's tone and is perfectly dreamlike, slipping easily between what feels first like the churning bowels of some fitful, sinister machine and then the aural expanse of moonless midnight in an exotic garden. It echoes some of Gabriel's earlier work, and to make matters more eerie, some of its chord changes and melodic turns seem to channel John Lennon (this happens again, amazingly and to good effect, in "My Head Sounds Like That").
The loping, lashing commentary of "The Barry Williams Show," told through a put-upon and endearingly contemptible tabloid TV sleaze-monger, is bitterly funny and certainly on target: "Before the show we calm them/ We sympathize, we care/ And the hostile folks we keep apart/ Till the red light says 'On Air.'" Luckily for Gabriel, it doesn't matter how late these observations are because they're still true -- and, for that matter, because the song's deep-digging groove is timeless.
Gabriel's greatest achievement is that his technical sophistication actually encourages a fully organic and man-made sound. For all of the album's well-tempered machinery, you can still hear fingers on a fretboard or drumskins, feet on piano pedals, drawn breath and, of course, voices. If you want to read the lyrics, you'll need a Web browser. But you can always just listen.
The penultimate track, "Signal to Noise," comes closest to making a mission statement, and you don't have to be a tech-geek to get it: "All the while the world is turning to noise/ Oh, the more that it's surrounding us/ The more that it destroys/ Turn up the signal/ Wipe out the noise."
Beyond reiterating his cultural critique in broader strokes, this seems to confirm that Gabriel's impassioned embrace of the information age has taken a toll on his attention span. Yet he somehow maintains his curiosity and stamina. There's a note of hard-won hope in this song (begun, perhaps, in the lovely and poignant outward reach of the previous track, "More Than This"), and then a crescendo to a perfectly planned collision and synthesis of Western and non-Western music. The result is everything you'd expect from Gabriel, even though you're not supposed to be expecting anything, and maybe the uppest thing about "Up."
He quickly recovers. The album's coda, a rending modernist piano ballad called "The Drop," has lines like this: "One by one/ You watch them fall/ No idea where they're going/ But down."
Observers have noted that Peter Gabriel often weighs his words with great and quiet care before speaking them. In conversation it seems like a sign of respect, and maybe that's the idea with the music too. An album every year -- even were he able to do it -- might be too much.
For those of us who work under regular deadline pressure (and when you think about it, don't we all?), Gabriel's modus operandi is infuriating and enviable. He routinely tells interviewers how easy it is for him to start things and how hard it is to finish them. Plenty of us have been there, but of course we haven't had interviewers or fans to explain it to.
While waiting to find out what was up with "Up," inquisitors resorted to cornering and demanding answers from Gabriel's colleagues, like bassist Tony Levin, online. Levin could only shrug; their guess was as good as his. He said that he distinctly remembered laying down a good hundred-plus tracks, thinking they sounded great, and leaving without knowing when he'd ever hear them again, waiting for the call to let him know when the tour would start.
Daniel Lanois, the co-producer, arranger and fellow detailer of the supremely nuanced "So," has observed that Gabriel would be better off recording his albums in the middle of the desert, where distractions could be minimized.
Could they? Gabriel -- the designer of "interactive experiences," bona fide conceptual art fabulist, farmer of high technology and, when he gets around to it, songwriter -- still nurses his dream projects, like, for instance, the ultimate 21st-century theme park, full of "the handmade, the high-tech, and the natural as much as the digital."
Musically, Gabriel has indeed taken to behaving like an experimental architect -- mulling over the basic problems of form, function, civic usefulness, spectacle, the balance of tradition and innovation -- but one who still appreciates comfortable living, thank God. The feng shui in his songs has only improved over the years. Which is why his most dedicated fans feel rewarded for following him anywhere.
If at first "Up" doesn't seem entirely worth the wait, take its maker's example and give it time. You may have to. Who knows when we can expect the next one.
09-24-02, 02:56 PM
#14
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I picked it up, and just having listened to three songs (the first two and "Barry Williams Show"), I'll give it a big thumbsup. Nice to hear him back, and at least what I've heard isn't as downbeat and funereal as some reviews make it sound. Looking forward to really immersing myself in it tonight.
09-24-02, 10:00 PM
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As I start my second spin of the full, official, uncompressed CD--convinced that Gabriel made the wait worthwhile by producing one of his best studio albums yet, "and fudge ye naysayers"--I note that the few of you with the rare combo of a 5.1 system attached to your computer, broadband internet, and Windows Media Player 9 have a wonderful treat coming to you:
http://windowsmedia.com/mg/Music.asp?
Tickets for the tour start going on sale this coming weekend...not that it sounds like I'll be able to afford them, but who knows...?
http://windowsmedia.com/mg/Music.asp?
Tickets for the tour start going on sale this coming weekend...not that it sounds like I'll be able to afford them, but who knows...?
09-29-02, 11:13 PM
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I have finally listened to the album in full, and there is little I can say to describe the joyous event. There were songs on this album which reached deep inside me and caused me to weep upon listening. Perhaps it was other things that contributed more to the need of an emotional cleansing, but this soundtrack was what it took to bring it to the surface. Suffice it to say, this will be my album of the year, and so far, the decade. I could not be more pleased with this album. It is truly a testament to the talent and genius of Peter Gabriel.
10-15-02, 11:43 PM
#17
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Join Date: Sep 1999
Location: The sprawling metropolis of Manassas Park, VA USA
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A little late to the party on this one, but definitely worth the wait. PG is one of the few guys who can pull off the 'quality vs. quantity' argument and still be successful.
Anyone have a link for the tour dates?
Anyone have a link for the tour dates?
10-16-02, 01:15 PM
#19
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Join Date: Jan 2000
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I am disappointed in PG/Clear Channel/whoever else for those ticket prices. Much as it pained me and I may regret it for years to come, I decided against dropping $150 to see him this December. I only hope he does a second leg of the tour with lower prices. I have never seen a PG show and would love to, but I refuse to let the music industry rape me for a concert ticket.
As for the album--weeks later, I remain convinced it is one of his best. It gets better with each listen and it's a shame the press is predictably out of step with it in many cases.
As for the album--weeks later, I remain convinced it is one of his best. It gets better with each listen and it's a shame the press is predictably out of step with it in many cases.
