585. Peter Gabriel - So (1986)

















Track Listing

1. Red Rain
2. Sledgehammer
3. Don't Give Up
4. That Voice Again
5. In Your Eyes
6. Mercy Street
7. Big Time
8. We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)
9. This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)


Review

We get to the last album of 1986, and we also get to what is the best pop music album of that unfortunate year. This is an album which has been unfortunately ruined by over-exposure of its very famous singles, but that rewards listening to it with a fresh mind, because the best music is outside of those singles, it isn't Don't Give Up or Sledgehammer that make this album great.

What makes it so good are the other tracks, Gabriel had been flirting with his own very specific idiom of pop on his earlier solo album, but here he goes all out while still creating some of the most original music of that year.

Then you have the collaborations with Laurie Anderson ( one of the most glaring omissions on this list his her Big Science album) in Excellent Birds for example and Youssou N'Dour in In Your Eyes or the Eno-like We Do What We're Told that just take the album up a notch. For some reason this is the only representative of pureish Pop ( is Graceland and Talk Talk pop? Maybe) in 1986 in this list, and it is a well deserved one.

Track Highlights

1. In Your Eyes
2. This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)
3. Red Rain
4. Big Time

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

It was Gabriel's first studio album to bear an official title. His previous regular albums were simply titled "Peter Gabriel". It is sometimes rumoured the name corresponds to the fifth note of the scale "do re mi fa so la ti do". However, according to Peter Gabriel himself, the title did not have any meaning. "It doesn't mean anything", he said in an interview with Smash Hits in 1986. "We just liked the form of the word and the two letters. That's all".

In Your Eyes: