Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel

(Virgin, 1986)

If I believed in events, I'd be inclined to say that this record "is" an event. Eleven years have now passed since Peter Gabriel left Genesis (the band that had by then become synonymous with him), four years since he last recorded a studio album ("Birdy" was a soundtrack assembled as a collage), and several months of waiting for this record to come out. Calling it simply by his own name again would have been too easy (certainly not banal, though — banality is a word absent from Gabriel's vocabulary); better, then, to call it simply "So". It's hardly a gamble, after all, that one of his albums in 1986 should turn out "this way". Peter Gabriel reached the point long ago where he can allow himself, without forcing anything, a show in constant transformation; no one hunts him down anymore like a wolf to be flushed out at the edge of the woods. Gabriel has caught every one of his trains without ever waiting for the stationmaster's whistle. His is the story of an artist who has never stopped looking at himself in the mirror and expanding reality beyond the patterns of everyday life.

This new record of his contains as much technology as it does soul. And that soul still goes by the name of rhythm. A powerful rhythm that ends up filling the entire sonic space with the regularity of a heartbeat, the depth of a spell repeated into infinity, the simplicity and effectiveness of a gesture coming from the dawn of time. This sound resembles nothing known before: it's still something incredible, new, unprecedented, comparable only to itself. The previous record had already shed binary rhythms and traditional percussion. This one goes even further. The eight tracks it contains are as many hymns to the future, syncopated ballads that throw a bridge toward the Nineties. Gabriel's voice is still there, carrying words and phrases, tormented landscapes, dark stories, recurring themes that keep a hold on the underlying harmonic structure. Every now and then, as in previous albums, we seem to catch a trace resembling "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway", but it's only a passing signal. Gabriel has chosen to let the sounds, the themes, the rhythms speak for themselves, drawing all the energy he can from the elemental contrast between the modulations of the electronic instruments and the inflections of his voice (closer than ever to his first mentor, Otis Redding).

The many collaborators surrounding him on this "So" are yet another testament to his artistic stature and intellectual charisma: there are the usual Jerry Marotta, Tony Levin, David Rhodes, producer and sound engineer Daniel Lanois, a fabulous French drummer, Manu Katché (a Gabriel discovery), a horn section led by Wayne Jackson, and also L. Shankar, Richard Tee, Stewart Copeland, Kate Bush (who had already worked with Gabriel back on his third album), Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, and Michael Been of Cali (with whom he had already sung on "Everywhere I Go"). A prestigious lineup that helps make this "So" an album comparable, in the depth of its tempos and the richness of its language, to Sting's "The Dream Of The Blue Turtles".

The way Peter Gabriel manages to draw vital sap from the most disparate musical sources remains nothing short of incredible. He's an expert at bone-marrow transplants (of new art, of new expression), even if you'll never spot him anywhere near Kyiv.

(from Rockstar, 1986)

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08/05/2026