Rolling Stone
By Dave Marsh | July 26, 2001
*****
Lucid and driven. Peter Gabriel's third solo album sticks in the mind like the haunted heroes of the best film noirs. With the obsessiveness of The Big Sleep (or, more aptly, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, since Gabriel is nothing if not self-conscious about his sources), the new LP's exhilaration derives from paranoia, yet its theme isn't fear so much as overwhelming guilt. If rock & roll is capable of comprehending original sin, then Peter Gabriel might be the man for the job.
Gabriel's methods are similar to those of Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler and Eric Ambler. The singer establishes an "innocent" character who watches the corruption of society from a distance until he finds himself being pulled inexorably toward the center of events. Finally, he's uncertain where observation ends and complicity begins. This is the essence of modern-day moral geometry — even the passive man must act — but that doesn't make it any less scary.
You could choose more arty and existential precedents, but Greene, Chandler and Ambler are the right ones, because Gabriel remains steeped in pop sensibility. Even while Peter Gabriel's instrumentation is utilizing African drums, Scottish bagpipes, electronic effects (Robert Fripp's discotronic guitar) and the most evocative whistling since The Bridge on the River Kwai, the music is built on a sound that helps make rock & roll an ally of the type of social clampdown Gabriel is singing about. When the music thunders with power chords, there's no hint of resolution or redemption: just the sound of the weak being trampled by the strong. The solace of Dick Morissey's sax solo — the record's one moment of pure sweetness — is immediately devastated by the goose-stepping bass drum and interrogative terror of "I Don't Remember," which smacks down hope with the rubber hose of the third degree.
Peter Gabriel is political rock, trapped halfway between the Gang of Four and Jackson Browne. Gabriel sees the personal horror in every issue — and the issue in every personal horror — and never pretends that the sight of so many open wounds doesn't make him flinch. For this artist, the traditional ways in which most rock & roll bands get out of such traps — by asserting the possibilities of community or simply by cutting up — are merely cul-de-sacs. In "And through the Wire," Gabriel turns Van Morrison's faith in the radio into a macabre joke. With "Lead a Normal Life," he makes the mainstream optimism and joy of Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen seem worse than naive — he makes you understand why it might be a lie.
Not that Peter Gabriel is always on target. His tribute to poet and black nationalist Steven Biko, who was apparently murdered by South African police, is a muddle. The melody and dynamics of "Biko" are irresistible, yet what Gabriel has to say is mainly sentimental. He says he can't sleep at night because "the man is dead." Why can't he sleep? After all the carnage the singer's presented here — "Games without Frontiers" reduces war itself to something as inevitable as a child's game — what's one more body? A lot, of course, but not for the reasons Gabriel offers. "You can blow out a candle/But you can't blow out a fire" isn't true, not when those lines conclude an album about the fires of possibility being permanently snuffed.
"Family Snapshot" is off the mark because it lapses into the cheapest sort of Freudianism. The protagonist is at last trying to take action (as an assassin), yet Gabriel views this mostly as the result of a lack of parental love. Practically every cut on the LP suggests far better reasons.
Despite its occasional lapses. Peter Gabriel is a tremendous record. At the very least, Gabriel has discarded the florid hedging that's dominated his work since Genesis. He's not backing off from anything now, including his excesses. He flinches, it's true, but he never yields. For once, you get an idea of where the artist stands and what he's afraid of. In such songs as "Intruder" and "Games without Frontiers," in which the booming, almost disco-style bass drum slows to an ebbing pulse while the guitars and synthesizers jangle like wracked nerves and the vocals crackle with detached doom, Gabriel's music resembles his cover portrait: features in disintegration, slowly melting away, all distinctions disappearing and not a damn thing anyone can do about it. Peter Gabriel has seen a hellish future, and there's no exit.
PopMatters
Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel [3] (SACD)
By Brian James 28 August 2003
By 1980, the future of Peter Gabriel‘s solo career seemed to be very mysterious indeed. After a strange and messy debut that didn’t exactly renounce his former grandiosity, he trimmed down his sound with a follow-up that promised much more than it delivered. In short, Gabriel seemed as if he wanted to move into territory in which his talent was unproven, and the world (or at least a small segment of it) waited to see if he would boldly charge ahead or slink back onto more comfortable ground.
When the third eponymous Gabriel album appeared, it effectively served to break once and for all with his past and trumpet the arrival of a new Peter Gabriel, one clearly distinct from the former front man of Genesis. The big change was that whereas once Gabriel’s boundless energy exploded outward, it was now introverted and dark. The result was the most detailed record he had yet made, not to mention the spookiest. Gabriel and producer Steve Lilywhite enforced a strict ban on cymbals and explored the now-vacant higher frequencies to the hilt, making eerie screeches and whistles as integral to their method as guitars and drums. It was just the approach they needed, giving the appropriate flesh to Gabriel’s dark lyrical concerns.
Those concerns were given a concomitant overhaul, as well. Like any well-meaning but immature poet, Gabriel had had a regrettable tendency towards the sweeping statement, and the emptiness of the results was inevitably crippling. By shooting for an all-encompassing declaration on this or that pressing concern, he had laid bare his utter lack of authority on such matters and came off as pretentious. On Peter Gabriel [3], he finally started focusing on the individual and quotidian to nearly the degree he should have. Not everything is perfect, of course, and college-radio-favorite “Games without Frontiers” is a particularly striking example. Attempting to bemoan the evils of war (at last, a pop song to counter all its pro-war counterparts!), “Games” is clumsy and sophomoric, turning the complex horror of international power-mongering into a facile allegory that only high school freshmen would feel smart for deciphering. On an earlier Gabriel album, this might have been par for the course, but it suffers here primarily because it is surrounded by songs artful enough to avoid such laziness.
The majority of the tracks are character sketches of people on society’s fringe: assassins, stalkers, and various stripes of the mentally ill. The accompanying music is so enjoyable that it raises the question as to whether the use of such themes exploits or glamorizes human suffering, but on more than enough occasions, Gabriel hits the perfect notes to communicate his ingenuous empathy. On “Family Snapshot”, he suddenly cuts away from the narrator’s assassination attempt to show a flashback of his lonely childhood, drawn in elegant terms. “Friends have all gone home / There’s my toy gun on the floor”, he sings in a tiny voice. “Come back mom and dad / You’re growing apart / You know that I’m growing up sad”. Such simplicity and directness had always eluded him before, and once he attained it, it was clear that he was finally accomplishing what he had always wanted to.
The real high water mark on the album came with its conclusion, “Biko”. A song about a murdered Apartheid activist, it was exactly the type of thing one could safely expect Gabriel to flub with his anthemic bent. And though it’s easy enough to imagine a stadium full of people chanting along to its chorus, it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Its repeated line, “The man is dead, the man is dead”, cuts right to the heart of the matter. It doesn’t waste time with forced analogies or metaphors but instead states the cold hard fact that a good man has been killed, a fact that needs no artsy garnish. In later years, Gabriel would take this approach to a less effective extreme, slaving away at the minute at the expense of larger matters like hooks, but for an all-too-brief moment, the pendulum was caught mid-swing and Gabriel seemed balanced out to near perfection.
Robert Christgau
Peter Gabriel [Mercury, 1980]
After hitting a sophomore jinx with Peter Gabriel, on Atlantic, the first man of Genesis fulfills the promise of Peter Gabriel, on Atco--with pessimistic postprog art-rock minidrama rather than DIY DOR. "Games Without Frontiers," a different kind of internationalism, and "Biko," a different kind of Africanism, lead and finish side two rather than side one. Either he doesn't know his own strengths or he underestimates his audience--or both. B-
AllMusic
Peter Gabriel [3]
AllMusic Rating *****
Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Generally regarded as Peter Gabriel's finest record, his third eponymous album finds him coming into his own, crafting an album that's artier, stronger, more song-oriented than before. Consider its ominous opener, the controlled menace of "Intruder." He's never found such a scary sound, yet it's a sexy scare, one that is undeniably alluring, and he keeps this going throughout the record. For an album so popular, it's remarkably bleak, chilly, and dark -- even radio favorites like "I Don't Remember" and "Games Without Frontiers" are hardly cheerful, spiked with paranoia and suspicion, insulated in introspection. For the first time, Gabriel has found the sound to match his themes, plus the songs to articulate his themes. Each aspect of the album works, feeding off each other, creating a romantically gloomy, appealingly arty masterpiece. It's the kind of record where you remember the details in the production as much as the hooks or the songs, which isn't to say that it's all surface -- it's just that the surface means as much as the songs, since it articulates the emotions as well as Gabriel's cubist lyrics and impassioned voice. He wound up having albums that sold more, or generated bigger hits, but this third Peter Gabriel album remains his masterpiece.
Amazon.com
An epic production highlighted by the clockwork undertones of "Intruder" and the Afro-prog-rock of "Biko," the third in Peter Gabriel's trilogy of eponymous solo titles is a watermark of the former Genesis singer's career. Drummer Jerry Marotta's tight global-groove templates drive the edgy guitar pastiches of Robert Fripp, David Rhodes, Paul Weller, and XTC's Dave Gregory. Yielding the enigmatic 1980 hit "Games Without Frontiers," the Steve Lillywhite-produced opus travels the dark psychic corners of its narrator with a then-profoundly futuristic sound that's no less compelling than Bowie's Scary Monsters, which was released the same year. The cover may depict Gabriel's melting face, but the album marks Gabriel's arrival as a solid solo artist. --James Rotondi