REAL WORLD
If Peter Gabriel’s first album of new material in more than 20 years hasn’t arrived with quite the fanfare you’d expect, that’s because all its songs are already out in the wild, the former Genesis frontman having released a new track on every full moon of the year. Why? Because he’s Peter Gabriel, and he does that sort of thing.
As you might expect from an artist knocking on the door of 74, it’s the quieter moments of autumnal reflection that prove the highlights on i/o. Playing For Time is a lushly romantic, Randy Newman-inspired meditation on age and memory, while the gorgeous Love Can Heal pulses and shimmers like a modern Mercy Street, its swooning cello and softly sighing chorus of female vocals (including Gabriel’s daughter Melanie) furnishing the album with its most transcendental moment of beauty. The sparse, plaintive So Much, meanwhile, plays like a spiritual successor to Here Comes The Flood, via The Blue Nile, with its ruminations on mortality (“The body stiffens, tires and aches, in its wrinkled blotchy skin/ With each decade more camouflage, for the wild-eyed child within”) recalling Leonard Cohen’s twilight years.