As a Peter Gabriel fan for over two decades, it’s dif­fi­cult to admit that I find myself strug­gling to appre­ci­ate his first new album in years.

There have always been three core things to love about Gabriel’s work: his lit­er­ate song­writ­ing, metic­u­lous sound­scapes, and emo­tion­ally expres­sive voice. Behind the creep­ily organic album art, Scratch My Back is an exper­i­ment in sub­trac­tion. It finds Gabriel cov­er­ing other artists’ songs, accom­pa­nied only by solo piano or orches­tra (the oddly defen­sive mar­ket­ing pitch “No drums, no gui­tars” says it all). That leaves only the voice. Soul­ful and grav­elly even as a teenage cofounder of Gen­e­sis in 1967, Gabriel’s voice should be more than enough to jus­tify any­thing, so my pat reduc­tion here is not totally fair. Gabriel and John Met­calfe clearly labored over these orches­tral arrange­ments, but I miss the com­plex son­ics of the rock and world music instru­men­ta­tion that has char­ac­ter­ized most of his music for over 40 years.

Gabriel did very nearly the oppo­site a decade ago, when his high-concept mil­len­nium project Ovo made a point of cast­ing Paul Buchanan and The Cocteau Twins’ Eliz­a­beth Fraser to sing his songs. The most recent col­lec­tion of his own songs was 2002’s Up, fol­lowed in 2009 by the col­lab­o­ra­tive project Big Blue Ball. Casual fans of his music might not be aware that Gabriel is an active human­i­tar­ian, par­tic­u­larly as cofounder of Wit­ness and The Elders, so the tem­po­ral gap between his musi­cal ven­tures is not entirely explained by chronic pro­cras­ti­na­tion (although he would prob­a­bly be the first to admit he’s eas­ily dis­tracted). Gabriel has stated that he hopes to work on more song-swap projects in the future, but first plans to work on some of his own songs. How long until he pre­pares a new album over which he can claim sole authorship?

Gabriel told the New York Times:

“I was try­ing to make a grown-up record […] This is treat­ing peo­ple as if they can han­dle dif­fi­cult music and words. Not that I’ve courted the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor before, but there’s a play­ful­ness and child­ish­ness in some of my older work that isn’t present on this record.”

He is pre­sum­ably refer­ring to the media satire of “Games With­out Fron­tiers” and “The Barry Williams Show”, the randy sex romps “Sledge­ham­mer” and “Kiss That Frog”, and the vaude­ville silli­ness of “Excuse Me” and “Big Time”. Gabriel is one of the few musi­cians that I first lis­tened to as a teenager, but whose music has aged with me. So I would have expected myself to appre­ci­ate an album of him cov­er­ing many songs that I know and love well (par­tic­u­larly David Bowie, Lou Reed, Elbow, and Talk­ing Heads), but I find that I don’t know what to make of Scratch my Back even after repeated listening.

Many song­writ­ers lose their dark edge as they age (case in point: Pink Floyd’s once tor­tured, prickly Roger Waters is now a big smi­ley softie), and by all accounts Gabriel should have been fol­low­ing that track too. After leav­ing Gen­e­sis in 1975 to deal with fam­ily issues, his first four solo albums were increas­ingly dark and sin­is­ter. But 1986’s So marked a notice­able turn­around in tone and an appar­ent psy­chic heal­ing. Now report­edly still pals with his old Gen­e­sis cohorts, aging grace­fully into a pot­belly and gnomish goa­tee, remar­ry­ing, father­ing two new sons, and rec­on­cil­ing with his two daugh­ters from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage, he seemed to be trans­form­ing into a cud­dly grand­fa­ther fig­ure. A trickle of releases over the past decade showed him favor­ing directly-worded songs for chil­dren, includ­ing the Oscar-nominated “That’ll Do” (from the movie Babe), the unsub­tle “Ani­mal Nation” (from The The Wild Thorn­ber­rys Movie), and “Down to Earth” (from Wall-E).

Sud­denly, he appears to have reversed back into depres­sive ter­ri­tory. Nearly every song cho­sen for Scratch My Back has been trans­formed into a mourn­ful dirge. Espe­cially when lis­tened to in one sit­ting, I find many of the inter­pre­ta­tions to be too depress­ing, and I actu­ally like depress­ing music. My favorite exam­ples along these lines are Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ cry-your-guts-out cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” (from the movie Don­nie Darko), and Elbow’s ago­niz­ingly heartrend­ing ver­sion of U2’s “Run­ning to Stand Still” (from the War Child ben­e­fit album Heroes).

Gabriel’s ver­sion of The Mag­netic Fields’ “Book of Love” has appar­ently become some­thing of a sen­sa­tion on YouTube, licensed in tele­vi­sion shows, and played at celebrity wed­dings. Per­haps I’m cold­hearted, but it does absolutely noth­ing for me. Song­writer Stephin Mer­ritt says his ver­sion was sar­cas­tic, while Gabriel’s is deadly serious:

At first I thought, How hilar­i­ous, he’s got a com­pletely dif­fer­ent take on the song. But after a few lis­tens I find it quite sweet. My ver­sion of the song focuses on the humor, and his focuses on the pathos. Of course, if I could sing like him I wouldn’t have to be a humorist.

Did Gabriel just plain miss Merritt’s point, or did he inten­tion­ally trans­form it into some­thing sen­ti­men­tal, singing the same words but alter­ing the instru­men­ta­tion and deliv­ery? All that said, some­thing to cher­ish in Gabriel’s cover is the pres­ence of his daugh­ter Melanie on back­ing vocals.

Elbow’s “Mir­ror­ball” is one of the most rav­ish­ing love songs I’ve heard. Elbow remixed Gabriel’s “More Than This” in 2002, pro­vid­ing a more organic rock struc­ture to Gabriel’s per­haps over-processed stu­dio orig­i­nal. But Gabriel does not return the favor here, turn­ing their gor­geous love song into a depres­sive bummer.

The once case where Gabriel’s bummer-o-vision may have actu­ally been appro­pri­ate is with Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bub­ble”, which actu­ally does have very dark lyrics.

The orig­i­nal record­ing of David Bowie’s “Heroes” boasts an unfor­get­table lead gui­tar line from Robert Fripp, which by his own rules Gabriel must sub­tract. He sings Bowie’s Berlin-inspired lyrics in cracked, anguished tones, not an emo­tion I asso­ciate with the song.

The one song I liked imme­di­ately was “Lis­ten­ing Wind”. The orig­i­nal is one of the odder tracks on Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light, and Gabriel rather amaz­ingly draws out a catchy melody embed­ded in the exper­i­men­tal song.

The Spe­cial Edi­tion includes a sec­ond cd with four bonus tracks: a cover of The Kinks’ “Water­loo Sun­set” and alter­nate ver­sions of “The Book of Love”, “My Body is a Cage”, and “Heroes”. It might have been inter­est­ing to also include some of Gabriel’s past cov­ers, includ­ing The Bea­t­les’ “Straw­berry Fields”, Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”, and Joseph Arthur’s “In the Sun”. I would have also very much liked to hear instru­men­tal mixes of some of Metcalfe’s orches­tral arrangements.

Offi­cial Peter Gabriel site: www.petergabriel.com

Buy the Scratch My Back Spe­cial Edi­tion from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.