Review Summary: Looking ahead while thinking back.
OVO stands as more than just a slight oddity to Gabriel fans for multiple reasons. For one, there’s some debate over whether it should be considered a soundtrack or a studio album.
Technically, although I’m inclined to side with the latter argument, there’s far more evidence to support the former.
The album was released as a companion piece to the opening show of the infamous London Millennium Stadium (built as a giant celebration of the new millennium that cost a lot of money and didn’t make nearly enough over the year it was open to really have been worth it), so
technically it’s a soundtrack, even if it doesn’t sound like one. But since it went with a stage show celebrating the turn of the millennium and that stage doesn’t exist anymore, we obviously can’t see the visuals that go with the music, unlike most soundtracks. This isn’t a problem though, because the music seems to be strongly divided from the stage performance in terms of its independence as a work of art, hence why it works so well as an album in its own right.
The only overt reference to the original show is the opener “The Story of OVO,” which (alright, let’s just get this over with) is a hip-hop song penned by Gabriel himself. There isn’t a problem with this song that wasn’t directly caused by an old, white male — as hip as he is — trying to suddenly write rap after being a rock musician for decades.
The song explicitly describes the plot in extremely painful detail to the listener with the grace of M. Night Shyamalan trying to do a freestyle on the plot of “The Last Airbender”:
Sofia was the girl
Living in her own world
She found love and joy
With a young sky boy
And so it goes.
Naturally, the instrumental of the track is far superior. It’s actually ridiculously incredible, so incredible that there’s an entire track dedicated to expanding upon it. This version, dubbed “The Man Who Loved the Earth / The Hand That Sold Shadows” sounds as if Gabriel gave those street performers that makes drums out of trash cans and other everyday items a million dollars and his studio for one week and asked them to a make a song.
One might argue that without the first track, the “concept” would make no sense to the audience. This is perfectly alright because without it, you wouldn’t really be able to tell if there is a story at all (f you’re curious, it’s just a convoluted and fantasy-esque retelling on Romeo and Juliet, groundbreaking I know). Getting rid of it would’ve saved the audience from a mess of confusion, and from an overlong, comical, and repetitive song that weighs down the entire work.
Okay, now that we’re over that, assume that everything I say from this point on completely disregards “The Story of OVO,” and understand that my score definitely does not.
This album is clearly Peter at his most experimental. Featuring deep explorations into ambient, world, celtic, and especially electronic music, it manages to be his most gentle and most abrasive work yet.
OVO also somehow works as a cohesive whole despite these leaps in genres. I mean, sure I can’t pretend that the Irish jig at the end of “The Weaver’s Reel” flows smoothly into the bittersweet piano ballad “Father, Son,” but countless other transitions work so brilliantly (such as the deep sigh of a nighttime soundscape ending “The Nest That Sailed the Sky” and leading into “Make Tomorrow”) that I have to fault the soundtrack medium for the slight lapses. Besides, the wholeness of the album has more to do with the clearly-defined themes present throughout than any concept of flow or storyline.
The most overt notion throughout the album, thanks to the time of its release and even its reason for being, is one of looking forward into the future. The new millennium had just begun, and the album is filled to the brim with hope and wonder for the future in tracks like the obviously titled “Make Tomorrow” and “The Time of the Turning.”
And while it caters these massive fascinations of what’s to come, at the same time it bases a huge amount of its musical inclinations in the past. Music since the beginning has always been built around our primal reactions to the power of noise and movement, and it’s pointless to deny that a giant amount of this album’s sonic palate encompases these simple but incredibly powerful notions. I just can’t imagine someone listening to “The Weaver’s Reel” or “The Man Who Loved the Earth” and not feeling an instinctual inclination to rock their head and tap their foot. It gets at the root of why we first started banging rocks and sticks together to make different sounds and beats in the first place. It’s as if Peter Gabriel decided the best way to look to the future was to pull from the past.
The best and most breathtaking moments on the album draw from an obvious theory about how music in the future might sound like combined with Gabriel’s own past experimentation, such as on the terrifyingly alien “The Tower that Ate People” with an opening that rings like a klaxon warning and glitchy electronic stutters that blend seamlessly with the African drumbeats that have become synonymous with his style.
Even the gentler moments are so huge and cinematic that they allow our emotions the freedom to run wild in the spacious fields we came from. For example, “Make Tomorrow” serves as an ethereal, massive, and breathtakingly gorgeous closer that ends the album on an unbelievable note of grace, and “The Nest That Sailed the Sky” weaves a surprisingly emotional ambient work full of simplicity and profundity at once.
I can understand why a lot of people don’t enjoy OVO. In many ways, it’s messy, convoluted, challenging, and impossible to get a good grasp of. Is it strange that these are the same reasons that I enjoy it?
Every problem brought up by trying to classify
OVO can be solved by simply not trying to classify it.
The answer to the puzzle that is
OVO is tricky. You must be willing to let yourself go completely. To immerse yourself into the music and forget your preconceptions of structure and genre. To allow your heart to sink back into its animal ways while pushing your mind out to the stars.
