Peter Gabriel

Us

Shallow and lame

Review Score:

(2/10)
Having been at one time obsessed with 1980s commercial music, I was rather late in buying Peter Gabriel's "Us" given the amount I used to listen to his 1986 singles like "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time". "Us" had received, it is true, some rather ordinary reviews in such magazines as Rolling Stone and among books like MusicHound, but I still felt in certain moods a little guilty of not owning the record when I had bought a great many less critically favoured ones.

I had known well of the despairing singles "Steam" and "Digging In The Dirt" for many years beforehand for the simple reason of their being played a great deal on classic rock radio in my native Australia.

However, it must be said that the singles - tearful and neither by any means easy to listen to nor possessing amazing vocal or emotional qualities - are totally unrepresentative of the rest of "Us". Nevertheless, the rest of "Us" really is despairingly slow and shallow. The remaining songs basically consist of seemingly exotic rhythms carried through a slow, meandering synthesiser that never succeeds in having any impact upon a listener even if (s)he listens really closely. Rather, the songs typify what the eccentric Joe S. Harrington calls "world muzak" with their almost new-age type feel - they move less than anything I have heard from Enya.

Gabriel's lyrics appear to be analysis of a type so distant from a listener that one wonders if he really is not a professional scientist dealing with music. On earlier singles, he at least gave some impression of feeling - something "Us" never even dabbles in.

On the whole, it is a pity I did not follow the advise of the sceptics about this album - but I rarely do if I think I MIGHT like something. To be avoided.

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