Hard to warm up to at first
5
By FitForAnImpendingDoom100
Upon first listen, I didn’t like Up as much as Peter Gabriel’s other albums, mostly because I expected a certain type of ambience and world texture that he usually used, increasingly so on Us. But it grew on me, and I realized that there was ambience, just of a different sort, and that even without world music injections Up is still a very well crafted and enjoyable experience. More than This is a good mid-tempo song that would fit on So, and Growing Up reeks of the early 2000s, in a good way. The Barry Williams Show might come off as vulgar but in actuality Gabriel based it off of The Jerry Springer Show, where he in fact featured such screwed up people as Gabriel describes. The song is very much against those kind of talk shows, likely because it makes entertainment out of people’s terrible lives and problems and therefore money by exploiting them; it’s not going for shock value, it’s just pointing out that those issues should not be attractions for ratings but kept private. Sky Blue is very lovely, with the Blind Boys of Alabama giving good vocalizations. But the best song of the whole album is the menacing, supremely dark and beautiful Signal to Noise, which boasts the best use of an orchestra by a prominent artist in popular music I’ve ever heard. Usually sappy, cheesy and even annoying when commonly used, the orchestra provides incredible texture and builds up to a tension that explodes in the climax, slashing with violent fervor and overpowering the song gloriously. There are a couple songs that are a little boring, though, that are too piano-oriented and not eclectic enough. But on the whole, Up is yet another testament to Peter Gabriel’s ingenuity and consistency, never having really made a truly awful album (even his first two, treading water as they were, weren’t too bad), and proving himself a master of craftsmanship in various ways.
