12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.
Peter Gabriel – Up (2002)
What can you expect from an album that was nearly ten years in the making? An album where the artist needed to take his time simply because the technology didn’t suit his needs to fulfill his vision. An album where one of the guest stars ended up actually dying during all the years between agreeing to do his part and recording it, which resulted in having to use a recording of his voice from an early live version. An album where you know that each and every one of those years was spent nitpicking each little sound, each production detail, everything. Overproduction is a phenomenon where a fairly alright song is covered in all sorts of production gimmicks and added sheen in order to make it sound better than it is. While a far rarer event than some might want to argue, it still happens. The key is in having a person who knows just what he’s doing handling the whole process.
Peter Gabriel is that sort of person. To most he’s known from the 80’s massive hit single Sledgehammer or the first singer of Genesis. After departing from Genesis due to creative differences, Gabriel’s had a slow and steady solo career that’s taken him through many guises and styles whenever he hasn’t been hopping all around the world and collaborating with regional superstars all around the world, in search for an amazing new sound to discover. After the gigantic hit album So (featuring the said Sledgehammer) Gabriel became busier and busier with his extra-curricular activities and his solo albums began growing sizeable gaps in time between one another. The man was always working on them, but because he was working on a billion other things at the same time, things simply took time. Between 1992’s somber and warm Us and his first (and seemingly only) studio album of the 00’s, 2002’s Up, Gabriel released two soundtracks and worked all around the world with countless other things. But from the very first listen of Up it’s clear that the man’s claims that he indeed did start work on its songs shortly after Us are very much true. Hell, Gabriel has also said that Up was already primarily ready around 1998 but he still took several years to apply finishing touches to it. If there’s an album that can truly claim to have the perfect sound crafted with precise touch, it’s Up.
(more…)