Review Summary: The one where he showed us his cards; he's just lucky that no one was looking.
Peter Garbiel’s second self-titled work is perhaps best represented by its shimmering opener, “On the Air.” A very good song on its own, it flounders as it tries to fuse pop appeal with the bombastic strangeness of his first album. The track has a decidedly more pop-rock feel than anything off of his debut. And to be fair, half of it
does feel like it was destined for the radio, while the other half feels like a delicious dive off the deep end. Even the title loudly displays its misguided intentions.
Despite this seeming pop direction for the album, the following track, “D.I.Y,” was the only one officially released as a single, and even that crashed and burned compared to the momentous achievements of “Solsbury Hill” from his first album. It was enough to make many critics prematurely label him as a one hit wonder. The album did not sell nearly as well as a whole compared his debut.
The lack of success is so obvious that it seems almost manufactured. Gabriel has always expressed distaste for this album, his producer Robert Fripp forced him to record the album in a matter of weeks (anyone who knows Gabriel’s career well knows he likes to take his time, his last studio album of original material took him 10 years to finish.) It's not hard to imagine him being so frustrated by the experience that he simply didn't mind if it wasn't successful.
Because of this, it’s not hard to tell that while this
Peter Gabriel is much more cohesive sonically than the first, it comes off as much more scattershot and thrown together. Many times the sounds simply don’t mix when they should, and do with much more success on his far more eclectic and better works to come.
That’s not to say that the album isn’t a success in other regards. The song “Exposure” is a blissfully spacey and haunted track, featuring a dark bassline and startling repetition, it works simply because it isn’t trying to be anything other than it already it is. The album also features one of his most incredible and emotional songs ever recorded, the lovely “Mother of Violence.” It’s glittery piano and acoustic strumming clash strongly with its desperate lyrics of fear and commercialism. But despite being the strongest song, it doesn’t quite weave into the fabric of the rest of the album, and its placement in the track listing is questionable at best.
Aside from these two, most of the album is filled with enjoyably strange but unnerving songs such as “A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World” with its fluttering keyboards and the trancey “White Shadow.” Each of them is good, even great in its own right, but Gabriel feels strangely unconfident on many of them. His vocals often hide behind the instrumentation, and his lyrics are never less brilliant than on this record. It’s as though he felt more at home in the swaggering ambition of his first album than this testing-the-waters attempt at pop-rock.
And perhaps this was exactly that: Gabriel simply trying his hand at weaving his more artistic ambitions with what makes the pop audience tick before truly branching out as he would in the future. We can only assume the lack of success here to be be intentional. That after the album’s release and just one single, Gabriel felt that this rushed album was not the best he could do. That he knew as we do know that without this album, we would not have the genius blend of art, rock, and pop that would bless us in his further works.
