Thursday, January 10, 2008

459. Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel III (1980)
















Track Listing

1. Intruder
2. No Self Control
3. Start
4. I Don't Remember
5. Family Snapshot
6. And Through The Wire
7. Games Without Frontiers
8. Not One Of Us
9. Lead A Normal Life
10. Biko

Review

So here is another Peter Gabriel album, and it is not the last in the list, but after this Gabriel took a more populist stance on music, even if he would later return to more obscure stuff. This is a great album, Gabriel has been influenced not only by his own prog past but also by the new electronic and ambient music of Kraftwerk and Brian Eno and also by "World Music".

This last influence is particularly noticeable in the last track of the album, Biko, a song of constant mirth for the Portuguese among you as the work Bico, pronounced the same way, means blowjob in the language. It is always funny to hear the epic, ecstatic cries of 'Biko, Bikooo'.

Then there are some perfect pop songs here, and the best known is probably the best example, Games Without Frontiers merges a great pop song with funny pop-culture imagery and more high-brow political commentary. This is all enhanced by the backing vocals of Kate Bush which recur throughout the album. In the end this is a great piece of intelligent pop by one of the masters of the genre.

Track Highlights

1. Games Without Frontiers
2. Biko
3. And Through The Wire
4. Intruder

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

This album is often referred to as Melt, referring to the album cover by Storm Thorgerson using image manipulation techniques employing a Polaroid SX-70 instant camera (though Thorgerson has said that Gabriel himself was involved with the smudging of several photos from the same session, and he does not remember whether he or Gabriel is responsible for the cover's final look.)

This album marked the first reunion of Gabriel with a member from Genesis: drummer, and current Genesis vocalist (as Gabriel's successor), Phil Collins.

Some guys made a video of Games Without Frontiers...Universal has the original video up on Youtube with embedding disabled, one day recording companies will figure out the fact that videos are adverts for music:

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back, man. I missed reading your commentaries.

Anonymous said...

welcome back indeed!

Francisco Silva said...

Thanks for the welcome backs, you should have me uninterrupted until May! :)

Anonymous said...

Glad to see you back. I thought you'd enjoyed freedom from the blog so much you'd done a runner.

Anonymous said...

Thanks to restart the blog ...

I would like to give a word of credit to Dave Gregory who plays some very good guitarparts on this record. He was at the same time guitarist of XTC ... a band that made some good LP's at the time ... but sadly unnoticed by so many ... "Drums & Wires" & "Black sea" are masterpieces of PUNKPOP ... I guess I'll have to wait for "Apple Venus" to show around the corner ...

Keep up the good work ...

Anonymous said...

Another thanks to see you back.

I know Biko and Games from other places, but I've only ever heard the German Language version of the Album. And since I don't speak German, I've got no idea what any of the songs are about.

Anonymous said...

About time. Get back to work Cisco. ;-)