Up

10/03/2002 10:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Ken Micallef

Years have passed since Peter Gabriel infiltrated MTV with "Sledgehammer," many more since he created high art rock with Genesis' Selling England By The Pound or his own spooked 1982 epic, Security. His last real work, '92's Us, sold millions. But come the late '90s and Gabriel was missing in action, and that is a shame. Not many possess Gabriel's amazing gifts of lyric precision, musical sophistication, love of absurdity and full-on embrace of a certain gleeful madness. This is a man for who face paint and bizarre stage costumes are only predated in rock and roll by Little Richard. Gabriel is a U.K. original.

Up is reportedly a dissertation on the cycles of death and rebirth, and it finds Gabriel abandoning the extroverted sheen of the "Sledgehammer" era to peer back into the belly of the beast: his. Full of the obscure and deranged moods that made Security alternately delightful and demented, this album revels in craggy vocals, thumping beats, esoteric instrumental sounds and a general feeling of beautiful dread.

Flutes moan and keyboards herald a twinkling death march in "Growing Up," where Gabriel sings "My ghost has got to travel." Kid stuff? Not quite. "Sky Blue" seems a plea for time to stand still as the song billows over yawning Bill Frisell-styled guitars and gentle hand percussion. The hopeful "I Grieve" (with samples that recall My Bloody Valentine), which seems to ponder a parent's death, ends with the uplifting chant "Life carries on and on and on" and then Gabriel's painful howl, "I grieve." "The Barry Williams Show" pushes the pain outward, lambasting a Maury Povitch-type television show, but its bleak sentiment nearly buries its sarcasm. "Nothing fades as fast as the future/Nothing clings like the past" is the message of "More Than This," the closer, "The Drop," describes passengers leaping from a plane over Tori Amos-worthy piano. Miserable stuff, and miserably beautiful.