Peter Gabriel
i/o
Real World Records
It’s been a long journey, from the release of ‘Panopticom,’ the first single timed to appear with the first full moon of 2023, to today, when i/o, Peter Gabriel’s first album of new music in 21 years, has officially entered the sublunar plane.
Along the way, Gabriel dropped piece after piece of the album’s jigsaw puzzle into the ether, each offering timed to appear with a new moon. These were so many breadcrumbs, kindly left to guide us, the patient listeners, along a path leading out of the darkness of our age toward something a little brighter, a little more decent, a little more hopeful.
The most substantial breadcrumb of all was surely the tour that Gabriel and his incredible band mounted to perform this new music, most of it still unreleased at the time. The concert, which I caught in Buffalo, NY, was a gift to all of us still clinging to the notion that popular culture can be meaningful, that every artistic endeavor isn’t at heart of a cynical or transactional design, that music still matters, even when it’s performed in a hockey arena, and accessed via a stub that has ‘Live Nation’ stamped on it.
And now we find ourselves here, clutching a golden ticket that gains us access to wisdom and empathy, dressed up as art, and presenting itself to us as a contemporary aural snapshot of the zeitgeist. Which is much, much more than might be reasonably expected from an artist of Gabriel’s vintage.
It’s tempting to come right out of the gate swinging, clutching the proclamation that this is Gabriel’s best album ever. But take a breath, and consider a catalog that includes albums like Security, Us and Up, unfettered masterpieces, all, and realize that what we’re getting with i/o is what Gabriel has always given us - deeply considered musical craftsmanship with an iconoclast’s eye toward the cutting edge of record-making, and a weathered Romantic’s ability to unearth, and then celebrate, hope amidst an environment of hopelessness. So i/o is simply another best album ever in a career that’s full of best albums ever.
The brilliance on display here is multi-hued and multi-layered.
The very Gabriel-esque conceit of releasing an album we’d been awaiting for more than two decades one single at a time, at the pleasure of Her Majesty the Moon, already sets the collection apart from the endless attention-seeking of social media-age pop artists. ‘What’s your hurry? Let this percolate for a while, let it grow, slow down and let it enter your life, if you’re interested,’ one imagines Gabriel the omniscient narrator whispering.
There’s the music itself, an ambitious and meticulous melange of grand-scale-but-earthy balladry, loam-infused funk, mischievous grooves, lush orchestrations, compelling and often surprising chord changes, Gabriel’s glorious gift of a voice (wholly undiminished, time’s passage be damned), and the considerable contributions of a curated list of musical collaborators that includes old friends (Tony Levin, Manu Katche, David Rhodes, Brian Eno, John Metcalfe, Melanie Gabriel) and new ones (Katie May, Oli Jacobs, Don E, Josh Shpak, Linnea Olsson).
There’s the presentation of the album in complimentary twin mixes - the ‘Bright Side Mix’ by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, and the ‘Dark-Side Mix,’ courtesy of Tchad Blake. (There’s also an ‘In-Side Mix,’ presented in Dolby Atmos.) Both stereo mixes are vital, and both are paired in the album’s many formats - vinyl box set or individual 2-record sets of each mix, compact disc, digital streaming. They offer different views of a secret world, one where a subtle addition to or subtraction from the mix can reveal a whole new character within a piece. They also offer us insight into Gabriel’s creative process, and suggest to us that taking two decades to make an album with this much attention to detail is actually quite understandable.
There’s Gabriel’s decision to engage a diverse array of contemporary fine artists for accompanying artworks based on each song, a series of commissions that Gabriel has said he hopes will add a further layer of meaning and an additional angle of view on each piece of the whole. The album’s packaging is as beautiful and striking as the music it’s wrapped around.
And then there’s the beating heart in the chest cavity of this music, that rhythmic purr and patter translated by the humble genius of Gabriel’s lyrics.
This collection of songs adds up to a reflection on connection, and the perversions of human potential that result from the severing of that connection.
The title track celebrates our natural kinship with the universe in all its manifestations - “So we think we really live apart/Because we’ve got two legs, a brain, and a heart?/We all belong to everything/To the octopus' suckers and the buzzard’s wing/To the elephant’s trunk and the buzzing bee’s sting,” Gabriel sings, capping it with the exultant refrain, “I’m just a part of everything.”
Implied in this is the idea that death, mourning, grief and loss are a part of that natural order, and Gabriel deals with all of them throughout i/o’s expanse, in a manner suffused with understated dignity and grace.
This might suggest that i/o is somehow an album redolent of despondency and gloom, but in fact, it’s to Gabriel’s eternal credit that the opposite is true.
The sum effect is an exultant, generous, kind, irreverent, searching, wisdom-infused music that elevates listeners willing to immerse themselves in it.
If there is a greater gift that music can offer than this, I’m unaware of it.
I’m listening to the Blu-Ray Atmos mix right now. It’s so good!
Thank you Jeff!