Peter Gabriel

Shaking The Tree

Flaws are Noticable, But Still an Entertaining Retrospecitve

Review Score:

(8/10)
SHAKING THE TREE: 16 GOLDEN GREATS was first released in 1990, at a time when Peter Gabriel was working on the long-awaited follow-up to SO. Since Gabriel was an artist whose work was best heard in his entire albums (like all album rock artists, essentially), the compilers wisely decided to give as much consideration to his album tracks ("I Don't Remember"; "Family Snapshot"; "San Jacinto"; "I Have the Touch"; "Biko"; "Red Rain") as to his hits ("Solsbury Hill"; "Games Without Frontiers"; "Shock the Monkey"; "Sledgehammer"; "Big Time").

But there are still a few problems with the record, not the least being it obviously does not have any tracks from US onward. Geffen Records did not own Gabriel's first two albums, so they decided to just borrow "Solsbury Hill" and put in "Here Comes the Flood" as a re-recording (which is still pretty good, anyway). Those two songs may be adequate representation of his first two albums for many people, but it still would have been nice to have heard "Moribund the Burgermeister"; "On the Air"; and "D.I.Y." on this collection as well. As for Gabriel's albums in the 1980s, all the songs are here except for one notable number- the lovely "In Your Eyes." Now, it may make sense why this song was not put in this collection (and, as a reviewer pointed out, Gabriel did not want this song in because of his recent divorce with his wife at the time), but it's still very annoying that it's not here, especially since the song is easily one of Gabriel's best. Also, the nonchronological sequencing here does not really work very well as a mix tape (in particular, going from "Solsbury Hill" to "I Don't Remember" to "Sledgehammer" nearly causes whiplash), and in order to fit all of these songs onto one compact disc, some of them were given edits that sometimes sound strange.

That said, SHAKING THE TREE is still a great place to go for a summary of Gabriel's solo work in the 1970s and 1980s (even if it is his only career-spanning compilation to date), since it still has most of his big numbers. Gabriel's catalog is sorely in need of a new collection, but until that collection comes, SHAKING THE TREE fills that gap pretty well.

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