Peter Gabriel – Scratch My Back (2010)

by Nick DeRiso

Peter Gabriel, always one for the theatrical, has begun a suitably elaborate two-part process with “Scratch My Back” — his first new work since 2002′s “Up.” This recording, featuring occasionally over-curated readings of work by others, will be followed by “I’ll Scratch Yours,” a return-the-favor CD that showcases these same artists tackling Gabriel’s catalogue.

The guy who once performed on stage in a flower costume — as the original frontman with Genesis; he later tackled neo-pro rock, synthesizer punk, African time signatures, MTV, Jesus, World Music beats and heartbreak, among many other things — can’t just do a cover song. It’s going to be an event.

Albeit one with piano and orchestra, this time. No guitars, or drums.

“I’ve always wanted to do an album of other people’s songs, but I thought that a regular covers album might be a bit boring,” Gabriel, 60, said in interviews preceding his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this month as a member of Genesis. “It might be a lot more fun to do a song swap, so you do one of my songs, and I do one of yours.”

You’ve heard of the slow-food movement? Call this slow music. It not only took a long time to get here but, once these songs finally arrive, you hear none of the playfulness that marks his best-known hits like “Sledgehammer,” “Steam” or “Big Time” — or even the title concept for this two-part set, for that matter.

Instead, Gabriel (with producer Bob Ezrin, of Pink Floyd fame) digs around in his melancholy, connecting the DNA of his sound with a wider world of music that surrounds it — if that world were one where swelling strings replaced rhythm. An album needs to rise and fall, to breathe and exhale, but this one only sighs.

There are moments, surely, when it works: Gabriel’s midtempo reimagining of “Boy in the Bubble” provides a bright surprise: This new chance for an intimate examination of Paul Simon‘s fascinatingly elliptical composing style — something almost lost on the galloping version from “Graceland.” A sharp-edged take on Bon Iver’s “Flume” works perfectly in this context.

At other times, however, the record seems to fall into something approaching a Shakespearean soliloquy. There is an eerie moodiness throughout; even the romantic asides feel like a lonely late-night phone call.

“Listening Wind,” a Talking Heads album cut, all but begs for a snare smash, a synthesizer zap, a riff. “Philadelphia” doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from Neil Young‘s sweetly memorable hymn featured on the film soundtrack of the same name. And Gabriel almost turns a scuffed-up Lou Reed song, “The Power of the Heart,” into something Disney-ish and treacly — not an easy task.

Most interesting, of course, should have been Gabriel’s take on Radiohead’s “Street Spirit,” since that band has always seemed to be so deeply influenced in part by Gabriel. Instead, he slows down an admittedly already very slow song to the point where it sounds like a drunk going all the way to the bottom of the bottle.

Best to skip back to the opener, where Gabriel kneads “Heroes” (embedded below) into a mournful cry, almost a requiem for those gone off on lost causes — and the mirror image of the soaring original by David Bowie and Brian Eno.

Meanwhile, “The Book of Love” (originally by the Magnetic Fields) seems to poke a hole in the billowing seriousness that nearly smothers this project: “The book of love,” Gabriel sings, “is long and boring — no one can lift the damn thing.”

That might have been an sadly prophetic criticism, if not for the odd successes that dot “Scratch My Back.” Not a perfect effort but, after eight long years, better than nothing, I suppose.