PETER GABRIEL - Scratch My Back

Thirty years ago it was Here Comes the Flood: now the flood has finally arrived. "Scratch My Back" is an album drenched, dripping. With rain, which recurs in some of the lyrics, but above all with memory.

A covers album is usually a sign of creative fatigue. Peter Gabriel knows this well — in forty years of career he's lost and found inspiration more than once — and he has no intention of turning in a merely calligraphic record, or coasting on someone else's ideas.

Gabriel's goal is emotional detachment, and singing other people's songs is a tool to achieve it. The tracks sound distant. Old and recent pieces alike become echoes of past lives, relics of emotions lost in memory.

What remains after the flood. The last man on earth, Gabriel searches for the warmth of memories, buried beneath a thick orchestral blanket. But everything is faded, soaked through: memory has altered every note and every image. Gone is the thrilling disorientation of the outsider in "The Boy In The Bubble", gone is the revolutionary force of love in "Heroes", gone too is the urban depression of "Street Spirit". In their place is only a resigned self-pity. Drops of piano fall slowly, strings ebb and flow like a tide, and a lethargic minimalism brushes against the desolation of late-period Talk Talk.

Memories and regrets of someone who sees their whole life behind them. And for one last time, Gabriel becomes the old man of "The Musical Box": a wreck run aground eons ago, a slave to his memories, by now incapable of feeling passion except through someone else.

And yet, something surfaces. Slowly the clouds part, and a ray of light shines through. It happens in "Mirrorball", in "Flume". In "My Body Is A Cage" the clearing skies follow a full-blown storm. "The Book Of Love" even manages to break time's spell, bringing back the dreamy euphoria of falling in love.

In "Listening Wind" the memory becomes more intense than the original event. Gusts of strings and suspended words: one of those whirlwinds that seem to appear as if by magic and dissolve in an instant, leaving behind a faint trace of enchantment in the air.

Just like this record. An unexpected marvel, a trick of the wind. One that vanishes on the words of "Street Spirit": fade out, again…

"Scratch My Back" is the result of a "cover swap" project. The artists honored here by P.G. will in turn record a cover of one of his songs. The first, "Not One of Us" in the Stephin Merritt (Magnetic Fields) version, is the b-side of the lead single "The Book of Love".

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04/02/2010