It isn’t normally a good sign when a late-in-their-career artist brings out a covers album. It normally signifies a significant drop in bankability and the chase of a fast buck; in the desperate hope that tried and tested tunes will earn them some attention.
Fortunately, Peter Gabriel’s career prospects seem a little more healthy. Gabriel is a man who doesn’t complete an album until he’s good and ready, which seems to be about roughly 8 years. If his hardcore fans were disappointed that this new release was not his long muted I/o project, at least they can take some solace in the fact that Scratch My Back is at least more high concept and significantly more challenging than the average covers collection.
Scratch My Back discards the Peter Gabriel style guide completely; there are no drums, no synths, and no guitar. Each song is played with orchestral arrangement; the arrangements are not lush or overblown, they’re carefully restrained and very deliberate – it’s the most low key thing he’s ever released.
The album puts its best foot forward with a version of Bowie’s Heroes. Not the easiest song to cover, Gabriel takes Bowie’s post glam-rock crowd pleaser and changes into a song of fragile, tender beauty. While Bowie’s original is an arms in the air anthem, Gabriel brings out its sweeping beauty, as if it were composed to be a morning after companion to its original. This is the best kind of cover version, one that makes comparison totally irrelevant; it has been taken apart and put back together to create a totally different entity.
Of course it can’t keep up that memento. And indeed, what follows is the mixed bag covers albums usually deliver. The melancholy strings perfectly serve the feelings of injustice behind Talking Heads’ Listening Wind and Gabriel’s more sweeping, grandiose take on Bon Iver’s Flume gives it a fresh touch of tenderness and intensity.
But some tunes rally against his wrought orchestrations. Paul Simon’s Boy in the Bubble loses its joyful melody. Arcade Fire’s My Body is a Cage is overdone, and the lyrics just don’t have the same impact sung by Gabriel’s more trained voice. And Radiohead’s Street Spirit becomes so tragic, it’s almost hilarious.
All together, it becomes a bit too much, a bit too melodramatic. But despite its misses, it’s hard not to admire the courage and ambition of the project. It’s not an easy thing to take a risk and throw away your safe, usual musical methodology and approach something in a completely different way. Scratch My Back may not be the greatest covers collection ever produced, but it’s got to be one of the most original and the most impressive.
