![]() Gabriel delivers his examinations of fear and disaster with an oddly paradoxical new emphasis on hope and restraint, displaying his usual fine craft and quality. The fourth Peter Gabriel (issued as Security by his American label, a move Gabriel did not endorse) refines this, drawing further on exotic rhythms (from Africa, Asia and America) with a musique concrète technique made possible by the Fairlight synthesizer, which allows unlimited manipulation of recorded sounds. “Biko,” a haunting political anthem about the South African martyr, and the internationalist “Games Without Frontiers” reveal Gabriel’s deepening commitment to global issues and social action. ![]() The ballads of social violence and urban fear - including “I Don’t Remember” and “Family Snapshot” - feature lyrics and intricate music finally blended (under producer Steve Lillywhite’s direction) into perfectly integrated high pop. Gabriel returned to a fuller sound on his third album, emphasizing striking electronics developed over unusual rhythms and delivered with seeming desperation. Issued a decade later, Revisited is a needless and not-quite-complete condensation of them.) ![]() (The first two records were combined on a 1983 British cassette. Freed from the onus of art-rock, Gabriel presents his most obsessive and personal compositions (e.g., “On the Air,” “Perspective”), packets of insight that are misleadingly restrained. (Although you would hardly mistake this for a punk album, Gabriel does neatly display his cognizance and support of what was going on with the song “D.I.Y.”) The new method showed Gabriel condensing his songs into tight units linked by themes of paranoia. In contrast, the second Peter Gabriel, produced in Holland by Fripp, employs the spare and uncluttered sound popularized by the punk movement. Produced by Bob Ezrin, and featuring the playing of Robert Fripp, Tony Levin, Steve Hunter and the London Symphony Orchestra, the album’s dark rock songs (“Solsbury Hill,” “Modern Love”) on Side One are paired with disturbing visions of armageddon (“Slowburn,” “Here Comes the Flood”) on Side Two, delivered in a wall of sound that fills in every musical corner. The symphonic pretensions of the first Peter Gabriel power a dramatic perception of personal and global apocalypse. It’s risible to recall that Phil Collins took over for him in Genesis in the mid-’70s. Not quite as pompous as Sting or as hidebound as Paul Simon, less of a chameleon than Bowie but more artistically committed than Madonna, Gabriel is a unique figure, and his occasional records have never succumbed to predictability, overbearing pretension or lazy plainness. He’s just got too many other things to do. ![]() That he’s enjoyed massive commercial success along the way seems almost incidental to his personal global village the relaxed pace of his recording career in no way bespeaks an absence of enthusiasm. From outlandishly costumed art-pop singer to world music pilgrim, human rights activist to video-savvy platinum dance-rocker, Peter Gabriel is the very model of a major modern highbrow music star: intellectual, involved, entrepreneurial, creatively adventurous, technologically au courant.
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