Peter Gabriel (Scratch)
Peter Gabriel (Melt)
Plays Live
Passion
Secret World Live
After 1986s smash hit album SO and the hits of �Sledgehammer,� �Don�t Give Up,� and �In Your Eyes,� that it spawned, Gabriel took plenty of time to get out his next album. During this period he rose to global fame and went through a nasty divorce from his wife. The experiences he went through in his rise to fame and his personal setbacks inspired much of the material on this album.
The opener �Come Talk to Me� sets the mood perfectly, highlighting Gabriel�s trademark use of ambience and ethnic rhythms along with the use of exotic instrumentation. This song gets to me with its bridge of �And the heart it will not be denied, till were both on the same damn side, all the barriers blown away,� the song simply is from the heart. �Loved to Be Loved� follows up with its soft rhythmic backing creating a soothing aural landscape for more of Gabriel�s poetry. �Blood of Eden� at first sounds like simple Adult Contemporary, but the vocal performance of Gabriel (incredible falsetto) and the rich textures of Sinead O� Conner take this brooding song into the stratosphere, as Gabriel plays with the dark and the light side of love and humanity through such lines as �Is that a dagger or a crucifix I see?�
The big hit from the album �Steam� is next, and while many consider it to be a �Sledgehammer� rip-off I think it actually improves the older hit. The funky bass lines laid down by Tony Levin help to punctuate Gabriel�s cries for �steam.� �Only Us� is a techno trance type song, that puts one into a plaintive mood. �Washing of the Water� is a beautiful almost country type song, with a dreamy mood. The other single on the album �Digging in the Dirt� is my choice for the second best track on the album, as it manages to contain many moods from despair to anger to pity and finally to acceptance, realizing the need of all of us to dig deep into ourselves in order to fully heal from the hurt we have experienced in the past.
�Fourteen Black Paintings� is mostly an instrumental and another mood piece, and is followed by the rocker �Kiss that Frog� which is a fairly obvious ode to uh stuff (Good old Gabriel and his sexual obsessions that can be seen all the way back in his early Genesis work). The closer to the album is �Secret World� which has incredible bass work from Levin and is a beautiful almost hymn rocker to the secret world of relationships.
Final Comments: I love this album. There are only a few albums that I connect to on a personal level, and this is one of them. Gabriel�s personal problems are a blessing as it created this wonderfully personal album that most people can relate to on some level. This gets my highest praise.
Final Score: *****
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