If there’s a through line to be teased out of the over 50 years of shiftless musical experimentation by British art-rock titan Peter Gabriel, it’s that there’s no obstacle humanity can’t overcome by pooling resources. This is the most scrutable message to be gleaned from the metaphysical narratives he pitched in an impactful stint as the singer of Genesis, the prog-rock band he created with schoolmates in 1967, whose apocalyptic concept albums resolve themselves through calls for radical togetherness. “Supper’s Ready,” the epic closer from 1972’s Foxtrot, conjures scenes from the end of the Book of Revelation: “Can’t you feel our souls ignite? / Shedding ever-changing colors / In the darkness of the fading night / Like the river joins the ocean.”
After leaving the band, Gabriel turned into an unlikely international pop star, navigating a solo career that grappled brilliantly with advances in technology and schisms in world politics, like calling out South African apartheid while exploring synthesizers and drum machines on the 1980 hit “Biko.” But he never stopped musing on the power in numbers. It’s there in the rejoinder he wrote for Kate Bush to sing back at his crestfallen verses in “Don’t Give Up,” their duet from the 1986 juggernaut So (“Don’t give up / ’Cause you have friends”) and in the carnal observations of “Blood of Eden,” the single featuring Sinead O’Connor from 1992’s Us: “I can hear the distant thunder of a million unheard souls / Of a million unheard souls / Watch each one reach for creature comfort / For the filling of their holes.” Writing about humanity the way biologists are more professionally inclined to, Gabriel saw our differences dissolve in the points at which our many journeys meet: birth, liberty, sex, death.
Getting back to an appreciation of the qualities that unite us is the root idea guiding i/o, the album Gabriel first conceptualized somewhere in the aftermath of the release of Up, when his creativity pushed him into a plethora of interdisciplinary interests — visionary political ideas like WITNESS, an organization pledging to assist activists in documenting injustices after the 1991 Rodney King beating, and quirky computer games like 1993’s Xplora1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World and 1996’s Peter Gabriel: Eve; everything but the album he’d been teasing. The concept got lost in the shuffle as he moved onto new endeavors, but it ultimately benefited from extra time in the oven.
i/o is an engaging survey of the many rooms in its creator’s wheelhouse and a succession of lofty dreams for the future, coupled with sage advice for how to get over the current hurdles to progress and prosperity. It’s a multimedia project that goes as deep as you want it to — spread over multiple mixes, newsletter dispatches, art pieces, and AI-generated music videos that are being released with each successive full moon throughout the year — and bound by a noble sociopolitical ethos the title track hones to a point: “So we think we really live apart / Because we 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 buzzing bee’s sting.” After two decades of greatest hits, covers, and rarities releases, the 73-year-old Gabriel uses i/o to provide encouragement in his work, and by extension everyone else’s, advancing after the mortal frame passes through the ecosystem as worm and plant food.
It’s thanks to Gabriel’s unique interests and affiliations that an hour-long ponderance of the dance of life and death can still feel light. The band convened for i/o taps longtime collaborators Brian Eno, King Crimson’s Tony Levin, guitarist David Rhodes, and drummer Manu Katché, fleshing out the arrangements with choirs from Soweto and Sweden and the orchestra that appeared on 2011’s covers-of-myself album New Blood. The veteran engineers Tchad Blake, Mark “Spike” Stent, and Hans-Martin Buff have crafted “Bright-Side,” “Dark-Side,” and “In-Side” mixes, giving listeners one shiny version, a grittier rendering, and a Dolby Atmos presentation of i/o’s 12 songs to peruse. If you want to luxuriate in the textural minutiae of Gabriel’s polyrhythms, the names of the mixes are instructive, musician-speak for the tendency of “bright” recordings to embrace a wider spectrum of sonic frequencies and “dark” ones to limit them tactfully. i/o’s mixing dichotomies offer split pathways to its message of love. “Road to Joy,” the triumphant return of the intricate robot-funk grooves powering So’s “Big Time” and “Sledgehammer,” highlights Rhodes and Eno’s Chic-like guitar lines on the bright side, Levin tiptoeing on staccato synth bass in the background. But on the dark side, it’s Tony’s show, his limber lines less overcrowded, now positioned right under the vocals.
Loosened from the shackles of the sexy ’90s dance-rock that weirded the back half of Us, Gabriel leans into his instincts as a drummer in songs like “The Court,” building exquisite stacks of sound upward from the beat. i/o strikes a delicate balance of big-band art-rock exercises and spectral ballads. It reconnects Gabriel with the twisting drive of the years when he zipped from prog to post-punk to a ceaseless study of international rhythmic and vocal approaches tipped off in 1978 when the BBC nudged a radio station over to a different frequency, and the British songwriter discovered African music. The orchestral majesty of New Blood and the 2010 covers album Scratch My Back loom largely over i/o’s quieter moments, as does Us, whose follow-up is the rare spiritual sequel that might be a little better than the original installment.
Backed by dozens of international players, Gabriel muses on the preservation of human memory and the toppling of oppressive systems, on how to document, protect, and advance culture but also on the finite amount of time anyone gets to carry out these plans. Offsetting songs like “The Court” and “Panopticom” — the latter flipping the famous prison concept on its head by envisioning a way for the masses to surveil people in power and the former poking at the question of why we trust justice systems swayed by memories, digital or not, that can be influenced and manipulated — are moments where the responsibility for future change and innovation is handed off to a new generation like a baton pass. “Playing for Time,” “And Still,” and “So Much” gorgeously reckon with mortality, reining in arrangements as Gabriel sings softly about the feeling of racing against the clock. “Playing for Time” finds the science-fiction angle, wishing we could stash fond remembrances away on a “planet of memories” to visit at the end of life, while “And Still” mourns the artist’s mother, juxtaposing the sights of the world moving on against accounting of the places her spirit can still be felt: “I wander ’round the house in which we lived / Cupboards full of coats and hats / Your presence everywhere / And in every corner, memories form / You warmed us like the sun.” It’s in these reflections that i/o lives up to its name, a reference to the flow of energy or audio signals (also: organs, as the repetition of the “filling their holes” phrasing from 1992’s “Blood of Eden” over 30 years later in “Road to Joy” suggests) from input to output.
In between all the going out and coming in that “i/o” details, we’re urged only to enjoy the small pleasures celebrated in “Olive Tree” — “I’ve got the sunlight warming my back / Warming up all my bones / I’ve got the cool breeze right on my skin / Bringing every cell to life / Making all connections live / From one point to another / And we’re all here, just the same / Trying to make some sense of it” — and to broker a better world for those who will inherit the run of the place from us. This is a lifetime commitment Peter Gabriel still seems serious about as he continues to thread the needle carefully on global humanitarian causes. In September, he teamed up with Artists for Action to Prevent Gun Violence, and in November, he reiterated his support of equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians alike in a blog post. i/o’s closer “Live and Let Live” feels like a crystallization of decades of seeking common cultural ground (and using Real World Records to spotlight the gifts of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Afro Celt Sound System, and others.) “Live” is a difficult ask rooted in the ideas Peter Gabriel is often turning over in his work as he sings about souls traveling along similar paths, stories converging like rivers meeting oceans. It’s your classic bleeding-heart rock and soul song about the hard work of saving the world that pulverizes through matter-of-fact proclamations: “This is how it turns / This is what we do / This is who we are / When we forgive we can move on / Release all the shackles one by one / We belong to the burden until it’s gone.” You have to consider the possibility that, 21 years after the last time he penned a fresh closer, he is thinking about capstones for an illustrious catalogue and leaving us marching orders to keep fighting the generational battle that “until it’s gone” implies (noting that Gabriel wants to continue releasing things around full moons). But here’s hoping we get to do this again.
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