Peter Gabriel
i/o
★★★★
REAL WORLD
PARTLY BASING their “world music inventing” comic creation Brian Pern on Peter Gabriel, Rhys Thomas and Simon Day had Brian make a Christmas LP in support of bi-polar polar bears. “I’m flattered by it,” Gabriel told MOJO’s Mark Blake when he asked about the parody. Game for a laugh, he seemed to recognise that his daft doppelgänger’s thirst for innovative and worthy projects rang true.
Though no orphaned bonobos jam with Gabriel on his first LP of new material since 2002’s Up, i/o – read in/out – is the typically techie, multi-media meshing work of one of rock’s true Renaissance men. Its themes, meanwhile, are as humane and forward-looking as ever, hence Panopticom (sic) advocates surveillance of suspect politicians by the people, and the title track’s pantheistic worldview highlights our connected-ness and mutual dependency.
In a very Brian Pern- like move, each full moon of 2023 has seen an i/o track released as a single, while the work’s two discs present Mark ‘Spike’ Stent’s painterly Bright-Side mix, and Tchad Blake’s more sculpted Dark-Side mix. Even before you peruse the LP’s vast supporting cast – The Soweto Gospel Choir, Brian Eno and long-trusted hands Tony Levin (bass), David Rhodes (guitar) and Manu Katché (drums) all figure here – there’s a hell of a lot to process.
You can spoof Gabriel, but you can’t knock his voice. None of its sumptuous richness has eroded, and there’s a moving, empathetic ache to orchestrated ballad Playing For Time, which explores personal mortality and our ailing blue planet. So Much, too, is an extremely eloquent, piano-led meditation on life’s autumn creeping to winter, “each decade more camouflage for the wild-eyed child within”.
Even if the tender, richly textured Love Can Heal, this record’s Mercy Street, seems in-hock to mid-’80s Gabriel, i/o’s songs hang together far better than one might expect given its long, sonic trend-spanning gestation. This Is Home – percussive ‘world’ groove, soulful, declamatory vocal – feels perfectly, classically Peter Gabriel, while And Still – written for and about his late mother Edith – is decidedly prog; a modulating, elegiacally English thing with flute and Elgar-like cello. “I place my head against your skin/As I did as a boy”, sings Gabriel, dropping his guard like never before.
What did we get for our 20-year wait? Something substantive, something deeply considered. Like sometime collaborator Kate Bush, Gabriel will incubate as long as is necessary. With so much to digest, that slow drip-drip of successive singles now makes perfect sense, but heard in a single sitting, i/o is something else again. Listening to it while considering the visual artworks specially commissioned for each track, you will be rewarded.
i/o is out December 1 via Real Word.
Portrait: Nadal Kander
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