Peter Gabriel: Up (2002)

(Geffen)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It really doesn't seem like this was almost a decade ago. In the early days of my internet access, when I was a new and sprightly Peter Gabriel fan, I remember following the updates and dispatches from the recording of this album on the web religiously. Its release seemed always to be right around the corner -- 1998 came and went, already six years past the predecessor Us, then year after year until by the time the record came out I was out of high school and attempting to create a life of my own in a terrifyingly sparse apartment. One of the happiest things about the autumn of 2002 was that Up, when it arrived, actually exceeded my expectations. But it quickly became so tied to that time, a frightening period of unemployment and fast-forwarded maturing, that I put it away for years shortly after that Christmas. Hearing it now, I'm taken completely aback at how many memories are tied to it, how vividly it brings back those times to me. I thus cannot guarantee I'm approaching this without bias. But since it recalls some very difficult times and I still find it a joy to listen to, I have a feeling it's as good as it seems to me.

The most striking thing about Up is that in its sprawling runtime (only one song doesn't exceed six minutes) you can hear the passing of the near-decade it took to create. The songs are meticulous, every sound and arrangement quirk and strange detour clearly as intricately conceived and considered as anything I've heard an artist of Gabriel's stature attempt. It's an audacious effort -- the thick walls of musical stunts and the perfect delicacy of all elements, in particular Gabriel's vocals (his most nuanced ever) and his subtle but striking integration of the pulsating African beat he toyed with more explicitly and frankly less effectively in the '80s. "Sky Blue" manages to improve on the joyously frenzied but achingly slow-paced bassline of "Don't Give Up" with an even lovelier, simpler vocal and chorus; the melancholy between the verses, the falsetto, the backing vocals, everything perfect -- one of the moments it's so clear there's no one else who can make pop music like this. Opener "Darkness" is an equally impressive jump ahead of classic "The Rhythm of the Heat" with its crashing, weaving dynamic and sophisticated, oppressive bleakness.

Of course, as any album largely recorded between 1995 and 1998 and stubbornly tweaked for four years after inevitably would, Up also betrays some weaknesses and tragedies that draw forth from the passage of time. Sobering is the 1997 loss of legendary Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whose presence lights the mournful "Signal to Noise" aflame. The song wasn't finished when he performed it onstage with Gabriel in the mid-'90s, but one of those televised renditions is the source of his contribution as heard on disc, the kind of technical wizardry that Gabriel has always taken for granted. He uses such resources more cleverly and responsibly than most anyone, another reason I'm crestfallen he's grown even more lethargic with the release of new material since Up, as I'm sure any future music of his would and will be a major technological coup with substance to match. A less happy consequence, though, of the wide gulf between the '90s and the release of the record, and now even more so, is the record's lone serious gaffe. Inexplicably issued as the single, "Barry Williams Show" is a mortifyingly self-serious jab at Jerry Springer and his trashy talk show, a nearly forgotten subject now that was already long irrelevant in 2002. The song isn't a horror musically, but its dire humorlessness make it a sore thumb on an otherwise tremendously beautiful album.

But what's remarkable about the great zigzagging of years across these ten tracks is their consistency of mood. As Us was an album about romance, the gaining and losing of human relationships, this is Gabriel's tackling of birth, growth, and death. The first half peaks with the absolutely massive "Growing Up," a stark answer song to the earlier Motown pastiches like "Sledgehammer" and "Steam"; no longer pure or sensual in his joy, Gabriel is here a somber worrier, the undeniable and room-shaking beat crashing up against the central theme: "Growing up / Looking for a place to live." For all the song's playfulness, it's rife with a central sense of guilt and regret. Later on, "I Grieve" sets the sharpest gutwrench of loss to an oceanic but incredibly subtle soundscape that gives another vocal nuanced in its sadness the immersive center stage. The enormity of the chorus may be the most artistically masterful moment on record from Gabriel. Even the doorways to a thousand churches in "In Your Eyes" seem trite in comparison.

Up surrounds from beginning to end with lovingly crafted noise that serves primarily to linger in memory as unresolved conflict, a beautiful and precise mess evocative of life itself. The closing suite of ballads "More Than This" and emotional powerhouse "Signal to Noise" are the point when the veil is simply gone, no memory of "Shock the Monkey" or Genesis whatsoever, just all an embrace and injection of regret and longing in a chilly, unforgiving world. All of Gabriel's music is big-picture stuff, favoring science and craft over emotion and impulse, but in its final effect on the listener it can be devastatingly personal and communicative, like all of the best African music that's inspired Gabriel throughout his solo career. This is a distinctly Western effort, but its essence is universal.