Mimicry and milestone

It's the little differences. While Sting currently own is an orchestral Monumental Monument while boil old, better days trying and be "standing" as a serious musician now with the third more classic album series tries in vain to underline the grandmaster Peter Gabriel bowed with a wonderful withhold album before great contemporary and promising young talent. How pleasant, not to pack his own work in aspic, but great heroes like Neil Young, David Bowie, Lou Reed as well as comparatively "alternative" acts such as Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Regina Spector, de Magnetic Fields or Elbow a new, unfamiliar context to give. Gabriel not always threatening relies on the classical instruments icing soup, not the grand gesture, but in an almost minimalist sound context, has him again as tasteless and fail, a far cry from the grizzled old work-classical Kitsch collaborations others rock musician. So quiet and contemplative as-Cover also cover album has become, orchestrated minimalistic, putting on the distinctive sonorous voice of British exceptional musician.

And it would, of course, no real Peter-Gabriel project, if it is not on his (only) eighth studio album would be a kind of concept 'here it is a kind song-sharing, about the exchanged in the real world world of music Torrents in which the gecoverten Gabriel artists in turn will make songs from him, which should appear on a later album. The idea of ​​the twin album is the exception, at least for the first of the two brothers well done 'which arranged by John Metcalfe (Durutti Column, which may explain the indie impact of selection) and produced by Bob Ezrin at the legendary Air Lyndhurst Studio recording shows that there still worthwhile to wait for a new album of Gabriel. No trace of the complex overproduction, with which he excelled at Up, but rather the simple but wild inwardness that perhaps "The Drop" already anticipated in 2002.

The artifice of Scratch my back is that the album at the same time enormous pathos enormous peace has' and yet an almost non collectable energy, a constantly looming, but never erupting storm, feeling even in the calmest tones that under the still water surface wild currents to flow, which are anything but harmless. The Boy in the Bubble, originally a cheerful swaying gumboot-inspired song, here gets the darkly luminous atmosphere that is worthy of the song has always been and elicits the text an entirely different dimension (as well as in Heroes' It's interesting as been slowed, depressed mood completely change the context of a text that can tilt and the most positive text elicits a bitter irony). My Body is a Cage of the Neon Bible album by Arcade Fire is already in the original a dusty Gospel, here but a theatrical production, a journey into the depths of the soul Mariana Trench, when Gabriel approximately in the middle of his version unscrewing all the fuses and an orchestra unleashed that in the Life recalls A Day of the Beatles, a cacophony to emporschraubende that eventually empties into the blackest silence. Some Tracke how Listening Wind of the Talking Heads, remain almost recognizable, while others, such as Street Spirit, are actually in the original already slowly and quietly be completely changed in Gabriel's version but with seemingly minimal interventions. Gabriel Covert not, he makes songs his own, he deconstructed, reassembled, changes logics and harmonies at the end arise to versions that could be originated by Peter Gabriel, which originated one hardly recognizes. Gabriel manages an admirable mimicry that did not transformed the subject, but the environment ', he appeared in the music and instead to transform itself, he transformed the original material so basically as it is rarely seen in cover versions' and yet remains always respectful to distance, interested, ironically, all this and yet with him.

It is almost inconceivable that finally a pop musician builds a bridge to classical music, while all the bad taste, the clichés, the exaggerations aside leaves and confidently blends with his voice in the orchestra, without being ever dominate. Scratch My Back is Gabriel still an innovator, still as a perfectionist who has grown from electronic Progpopper for grand doyen beyond all categories, one of the most characteristic and most distinctive musicians that we have and are rarely so from his introspective and dark side shows how here. It's a long journey from the wirschen cabaret sounds of Excuse me, the sound of Numanesquen Games Without Frontiers, or the affirmative of Pop Sledgehammer to the powerful dark energy that radiates this album with almost every track. Where other musicians expire after 40 years of career in self-quotation and insignificance and bother with albums which only serve as an excuse for the next stadium tour (at best), the great English eccentrics delivers here a milestone from which a new vein of his music as pure as rarely before uncovers and reveals.