LaRM day 164 (catch-up-Peter Gabriel)

The debut album by Clock Opera, called Ways to Forget (2012) is another great bit of retro genre-mashing.  It's from the same school as Everything Everything's debut but the focus for Clock Opera is much more a kind of M83 style of 1980's revisionism than the jerky new waveisms.  Interestingly one of the most obvious influences behind the album is the Blue Nile and while Ways To Forget is much less glacial sounding or emotionally direct as the Blue Nile, the basic fusion of a kind of emotional intensely with electronics is very similar and indeed the vocal delivery is like a meeting of Paul Buchanan's world-weary beauty (there's a clear nod in the delicate 'Belongings') and Jimi Goodwin's skyscraping emoting.  There are some problems, the lyrics are sometimes pretty poor and the whole thing can get a bit overblown now and then ('Man-Made' is a bit much with it's rocked out central riff), but when it's good it's great, and the endless nods to a late-80's mix of indie and electro-pop are really well worked out, and there are some supremely well structured big choruses.

 Being the sister of an uber-producer is going to put people on edge when you release your record, and so it has come to pass for Mary Epworth, whose lightly freaked-out, fuzzy edged folk-rock has left people either scratching their heads or grudgingly admitting that it's pretty good.  Personally I couldn't care less whose relative she is, I think there's some interesting stuff going on in debut album Dream Life (2012).  Once you get beyond the big Dusty by Adele opener 'Long Gone' there's some real gold.  Interestingly you can actually hear what she was getting at with 'Long Gone', I think it was meant to be like the opening songs on Sandy Denny's albums, the big, showy number that opens the show (Epworth was first really noticed when she took part in a tribute to Sandy Denny a couple of years back), and the influence of Sandy is pretty clear throughout the record.  Single 'Black Doe' is rightly being described as the best thing on the album, with its loping, looping banjo riff and Epworth's breathy but direct, Dot Allison-ish vocals.  In fact Dot Allison is probably a reasonable comparison, Dream Life is very similar to Allison's albums with their gauzy haziness, darkened tone and unexpected instrumentation.

So that's that for the catch-up and it's on to G with a surprising number of Peter Gabriel solo albums.  Now, obviously, in this post-prog world we're finally allowed to admit that we all love the Gabriel.  I certainly do and the first album, released in 1977 after getting his stuff together following his departure from Genesis, is a fantastic bit of absurdly over-the-top prog.  The whole thing is set out, something in the style of an overture, by opener 'Moribund the Burgermeister' which has soaring choruses, beautiful vocal melodies, silly squelchy electronics, stupid funny voices, an unnecessarily intricate arrangement and impenetrable lyrics.  It's total prog, no question, and it lays out the elements of the songs to follow, from 'Solsbury Hill's gentle pastoralism to 'Here Comes the Flood's massive and hugely impressive emotional and musical grandstanding.  There is, of course, some inexcusable rubbish - the Kurt Weill riffing of 'Excuse Me' (natch) is pretty dreadful and the bar-room piano jazz by way of prog workout of 'Waiting for the Big One' is something of a bore.  But the big rock of 'Modern Love' and 'Slowburn' and the ridiculous disco-rock of 'Down the Dolce Vita' are good fun and the album as a whole, although terribly uneven and inconsistent, is an enjoyable bit of daft prog.

The third Gabriel album, released in 1980 is a marked improvement on the debut, a much more serious record and much less of a prog exercise.  It's still an odd and very muso record, but the songs are much more clearly defined, and the silliness has been turned into something rather more determined.  The sound that would make him a gazillion pounds on So is just starting to coalesce on the third album and you can hear where he was heading quite clearly.  If anything, where prog is just muso noodling, from this point on Gabriel was trying the impossible, to make art out of rock music, and although it's a doomed ambition it's one that I can't help but have some respect for, especially when it's coupled with an equally doomed but serious minded attempt to make valid political statements in the same format.  It's too easy now to hear 'Biko' as a boringly worthy, liberal-hearted bit of polemicism, but it's worth listening to the sound of the thing again, if only to be reminded that it's as much the feeling as it is the lyrics of the song that are trying to make the point; and although we seem to like to scoff at trying to be serious in these light-hearted Nuts reading times, I'm quite happy to applaud attempts at saying something of some weight.  Anyway, that's the thing about the third Peter Gabriel album, it's dense, it's extremely dark and it's shot through with a paranoid misanthropy ('Family Snapshot' and 'Not One Of Us' are particularly bleak), but it's still engaged, musically, psychologically and ideologically and where it may seem to be the product of a time that we don't have much respect for, I think it's a great record.

The rock as art idea is taken to its furthest point with the fourth self-titled album (released in 1982).  It's almost entirely composed and recording using the Fairlight keyboard, using samples as the foundation for all of the music.  Everybody was using the Fairlight at that time and it was seen as being a kind of liberating glimpse of the future.  Most people used it to bolster their hideous Level 42 style sound, but Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel took it as an instrument in its own right (they were all wrong, it wasn't the future because good lord it's a dated sound now) and did much more interesting stuff with it.  Anyway, the fourth album is an extremely spooky record, it's all about atmosphere.  I can remember when I was about ten years old and alone in my parents house, I put on a tape thinking it was UB40 (I was 10 remember, that's my excuse) but my dad had taped the Gabriel album over it and when 'The Rhythm of the Heat' started I was so scared by it I didn't dare move a muscle.  All that gloomy banging and chanting and clattering and howling, it was all terrifying.  Listening to it now, it's still a fantastically evocative song and it's a real freak-out of an intro to an album.  Every song is pretty powerful in its own way, with strange pulsing throbbing noises and tinkling arhythms, and the majority of it is quietly unsettling.  Lyrically it's pretty dense and preempts his Real World work in a way, with songs spanning the globe and human history - it's ambitious, certainly, it fails often, certainly, but Gabriel is smart enough to stay sufficiently oblique to let the mood take the foreground always.  There were a lot of interesting and challenging records being made by the early 1980's but even so, like them or hate them, nobody was making records that sounded like this.

After releasing a live album and a soundtrack Gabriel went back to the studio with the ubiquitous Daniel Lanois in the producer's chair and a different approach.  From the Peter Saville cover onwards, everything about So (1986) screams commercial potential.  For a start the album has a title and the cover picture of Gabriel is in direct contrast to his smeared portraits of previous albums (which he says his record company told him "alienated women").  Thanks presumably to Lanois the sound is processed to oblivion and its digital clarity is absolutely pristine, in keeping with everything he's site managed over the years.  There's no doubt that everything about the record has become sort of iconic, from the 'Sledgehammer' video to the Kate Bush duet 'Don't Give Up' and personally, although I know I shouldn't, I really like it.  It's a strange combination of the emotionally engaging and the superficially facile and although the fretless bass, treated drum stuff has dated pretty brutally, at heart the songs really are good.  Ironically though it's at its best when it recalls the previous two studio albums and cuts back on the showy studio trickery and lowers the mood - side two's 'In Your Eyes', 'Mercy Street' and the album closer 'We Do What We're Told' are spooky and disquieting pop songs and reveal that underneath all the gloss is still an odd and idiosyncratic record.

Finally for today, but not quite for Peter Gabriel (we've got his, er, interesting covers album still to do), we have the sprawling compilation Hit, released in 2003 and covering his entire solo career to that date.  A lot of it has been dealt with already, but a surprisingly large amount of the content focuses on his post-So, less massive career.  The problem there is that after the success of So, it feels a bit like he couldn't find a way out of that particular sound and style and it's all been variations on a theme ever since, with diminishing returns.  The songs from the Us album from 1992 are OK and there are odd little contributions to soundtracks which are interesting, but there's some stuff that doesn't do much ('Growing Up' is pretty much a waste of time).  It's telling that for a compilation album you find yourself hankering for tunes from only the first third of someone's career.