The 1982 Listening Post - Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel (AKA Peter Gabriel 4, AKA Security)

 Reviewed by Scott Arciniegas

Released: September 6 1982 Peter Gabriel Peter Gabriel (AKA Peter Gabriel 4, AKA Security) Genre: Peter Gabriel Allen's Rating: 4 out of 5 Scott's Rating: 4.75 out of 5 Highlights: The Rhythm Of The Heat I Have The Touch The Family And The Fishing Net Lay Your Hands On Me Wallflower I, like Peter Gabriel, can make things entirely too complicated. I have been sitting on this review for like 2 months: starting it, stopping; abandoning it and starting over; listening and re-listening to the album, as if it has ever gone out of my heavy rotation since I first bought it on vinyl in 1983 (I can listen to it note-for-note in my head and, for the final write-up of this review, actually did); doing research and dredging my memory for conversations between myself and my prog-rock-obsessed older brother (who was more of a Rush fan than a Genesis/Peter Gabriel guy, but still, much love and respect, Dave)… This ain’t that hard. This album was Peter Gabriel’s fourth solo album, and the fourth to be titled “Peter Gabriel”. Geffen Records didn’t like that, so they changed it to Security in the US. Peter Gabriel didn’t like being on Geffen, so once he broke free and started his own label, Real World Records, which he used to shine a spotlight on a whole slew of artists from around the world, hopefully putting some money in their pockets (and his) in the process. On his first four albums, Gabriel evolved, from too-theatrical-to-be-really-listenable prog-rock wunderkind and front man, to a rock artist with a penchant for stories, but also possessed of pop chops that produced the occasional “Salisbury Hill” or “Games Without Frontiers”; he still had a flair for the theatrical, sure, and would dabble in orchestral interludes or almost jazzy pieces, but at his heart he was an English guy who made artsy rock music with a literary and sometimes political bent. With Peter Gabriel [4: Security] (as it’s known I certain circles), he takes a great evolutionary leap forward. The theatrical flourishes become fully cinematic, both in narrative and arrangement, telling stories that paint vivid celluloid scenes in the viewer’s minds’ eyes. There is the opening track, “The Rhythm of the Heat,” apparently an exploration of Jungian something or other. My psychology studies went particularly neuro-based, so if I’m honest I don’t much go in for that Jungian junk. But this song, a journey to the center of the listener’s mind, I can get into: Smash the radio (no outside voices here) Smash the watch (cannot tear the day to shreds) Smash the camera (cannot steal away the spirits) The rhythm has his soul, maaaaan, and when the Ekome Dance company comes in with a pounding Ghanaian rhythm that drives the song into a frenzy and comes crashing down into the stillness before the second track—well, if it didn’t also stir something in you, you might wanna just cleanse your palette with a Power Pop record and do something else with the next 40 minutes. About that second track, “San Jacinto”: it’s a story told by Gabriel of a Native American man going back to the Res and observing the co-opting of his culture by the ever-encroaching White Man and by Capitalism. Is that ironic? Only kinda, as Peter Gabriel is English, not America. So yeah, sure, it is. Is this cultural appropriation? Probably. Is it a good song? Kinda, yeah; paints a really vivid picture and points the listener’s sympathies in the right direction. Would it be okay for a White Man who isn’t Peter Gabriel to release this song today? Probably not. Luckily—or not, depending on your perspective—Peter Gabriel released this song in 1982. Welcome to The Listening Post. “I Have the Touch” is about as close to a regular rock song as you’re going to find on this record, but thanks to this album’s top-notch prog rhythm section of Tony Levin on stick bass—he next-levls every record he appears on—and Jerry Marotta on drum kit, along with the call-and-response between Gabriel’s lead vocals and the backup: it’s a banger. “The Family and the Fishing Net”: at first listen this closer to Side 1 seems another piece of ethnographic exoticism, a recounting of the strange matrimonial rites of some alien tribe. The music, and especially the ever-building and eventually straight-up wailing backup vocals reiterate this sense of the strange and exotic. A close analysis of the lyrics reveals the strange tribe to be us, the curious wedding rituals the same ones we’ve attended many times. We were the strange tribe all along! It’s a little Twilight Zone, sure, but hell, I like the Twilight Zone. Side 2 opens with “Shock the Monkey.” Nobody doesn’t know this track. My only criticism is that I’ve heard it too many times, but one can hardly blame Peter Gabriel for rock radio’s unwillingness to dig deep. I always thought the song was about vivisection, based on the last shot of the music video, I suppose, but a little reading informs me that it’s about jealousy. Huh. That works too. “Lay Your Hands On Me”: Gabriel talks his way through the verses (albeit in a rhythmic talking that is doesn’t feel like he’s trying to rap, thankfully), and sings the refrain; and then, again, there’s that call-and-response chorus that Gabriel does so well. The song structure is an ancestor of the “loud quiet loud” thing that the Pixies would later make famous, and the drama it imparts makes this track feel like the soundtrack to a nonexistent short film, no doubt the winner of an imaginary BAFTA award). On “Wallflower” Gabriel continues the work he began with “Biko” (1980), and that he would continue until he became one of the world’s most famous activists for political prisoners and Amnesty International: Though you may disappear You’re not forgotten here And I will say to you I will do what I can do Well, you gotta hand it to him. He totally did. And made a moving track in the process. The album closer is “Kiss of Life”: it’s a big, rousing rack about … a big woman? Dancing? Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Yes, all three. It’s got banging drums, huge synth flourishes (that I’m sure some of this group’s synth haters will take exception to), Tony Levin Tony Levin-ing it up like crazy. When the final note strikes and reverberates and fades to nothing, you’re left wanting for nothing. Does this album take itself seriously? It does. It’s a Peter Gabriel album. Serious is kind of his thing. But it brings serious musicians together, making complex songs, telling vivid tales through visual language that lets the listener see the whole thing in their mind’s and a feel in in their hearts and/or their feet. It is a great record. And that, Listening Post listeners, is the simple version of my album review.

The 1981 Listening Post - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality

 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality

#755

by Scott E. Arciniegas

November 6, 1981

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Architecture and Morality

Genre: New Wave Synth Pop

Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Scott's Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Highlights:

Sealand

The New Stone Age

Architecture and Morality

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark has always been a band with a conflict at its center: not one of artistic differences between its songwriters or singers (although eventually those too), but of what this band is and what it's trying to do.

If one were to judge the band based on their highest-charting and best-known single, 1986's "If You Leave"—one of the many tracks that makes the soundtrack to John Hughs' Molly Ringwald vehicle, Pretty in Pink, one of the most indispensable soundtrack records of the decade—one would think them to be a competent if lightweight synth-pop band: adult men with big shoulder pads wailing like lovelorn teenagers over beeping, sequenced synths and sweeping strings.

And that is actually a pretty fair assessment of about half of OMD's catalog.

But the other side of the internal struggle driving the manouevres of this nocturnal synth orchestra is more experimental and considerably darker: guitar work echoing Joy Division, ambient soundscapes, proto-industrial percussion, choral samples bent and layered and distorted, tape samples played on a Mellotron…

These two sensibilities struggle for supremacy in OMD's 1981 album, Architecture and Morality…sometimes within the same track. The result is a record that is sweet and dark and melancholy and mournful and bouncy, which is why it's cited as a seminal influence for musicians over the subsequent decades from Depeche Mode to Spoons to Moby to The Charlatans UK.

The album's first track, "The New Stone Age" opens with creaking noises, synthesized wind, and in time a drum machine kick that echoes Kraftwerk's "Geiger Counter". When the jangling, slightly out-of-tune guitar strum comes in, followed by a buzzsaw-shrieking synth line, it becomes pretty clear that this isn't exactly a bubblegum synth pop album. Lead singer Andy McCluskey's vocals are an earnest wail, and accompanied by backup vocals in a sometimes syncopated counter-rhythm: "Oh my god, what have we done this time," the chorus goes, the line repeated only twice before the synth wails take back over, and are eventually subsumed by an airplane-like drone that fades into the distance. It's a hell of an album opener.

With track two, "She's Leaving," the bubblegum synth-pop machine kicks into gear. It's sweet and beautifully crafted, chugging ever forward, occasionally gliding in neutral to let McCluskey's croon take over. "Souvenir," the third track (and the first of the three singles Architecture and Morality produced) features the band's other vocalist, Paul Humphries, also in sweet-pop mode. From these tracks it's easier to see the groundwork laid for the edifice of "If You Leave" that would eventually tower over their back catalog.

And then comes track four, the almost-8-minute "Sealand." An ambient harbor-town soundscape and plaintive, out-of-tune melodion are joined by a mid-tempo beat and, eventually, lush synths…it's almost a dirge. Nearly halfway through the track, all but the kick, a drum machine hi-hat, and the sparest of synth chords step aside for McCluskey to sing a sad scene of seaside life in all of two lines. The remaining 3 minutes bring cacophonous industrial percussion, which then give way to a drum-free synth section. The whole thing has the feel of a Tunnel-of-Love-style amusement park ride, only it's a Tunnel of Isolation, and it's less of an amusement park and more of a depression park.

In the back half of the album these same forces continue to do battle, with haunting, often danceable (or at least sway-to-able) results.

I realize that all of this may not sound like it adds up to a glowing review. "So wait," said my girlfriend Kate, as I was describing the record to her, "did you even like it? It doesn't sound like you did."

Oh, I liked it. I actually kinda loved it. I don't know that I fully understand it—or at least I don't know that I understand how a band decides that this is the artistic direction they want to go—but I don't know that understanding something is necessary to loving it. In the case of Architecture and Morality, I'm happy to just marvel at it. And occasionally bop along to the beat.

https://open.spotify.com/album/6bR98XzGnklTORDvZ7Oc2i?si=1m6Zy5T6SKW09I_wqmM0xga