PETER GABRIEL 2 [AKA: SCRATCH]

Peter GABRIEL cultivated a reputation as something of a crank with his second album, choosing a cover that traded in self-obscurity for self-mutilation and again refusing to give the album a proper title (which must have given folks at the label fits). But the crankiness is most evident in the music, from "A Wonderful Day In A One-Way World" to "Animal Magic". Unlike his debut, which tried its hand at all sorts of things, this album focuses on modern rock, delivered by producer Robert Fripp with all the rough edges intact (a style he would replicate on his own Exposure). There are some quieter moments, achingly sad in the case of "Mother of Violence" and "Home Sweet Home", but GABRIEL's perturbation is still tangible even in these settings. Since it's something of an itchy sweater as albums go, this record rarely comes out of the closet, but I've always had a soft spot for it. Songs like "Flotsam and Jetsam" and "Indigo" generate genuine pathos, while the slicker tracks ("Perspective", "D.I.Y.") make a better case for GABRIEL as a "new" rock artist than "Modern Love" ever could.

Yeah, his voice isn't the commodity here that it once was (and would become again) and the arrangements are stuck in an awkward halfway point between plain old rock & roll and the darker, dire arrangements of the future, but the songs are clearly cut from the stuff of genius. GABRIEL hadn't quite locked into the "vision" thing yet, but Peter GABRIEL version 2 was at least promising. There are some very good ideas here, packaged into confining conventional parcels out of habit, which would explode from their containers and take a more fantastic shape on his next album. Or next installment, depending on how you see these things.