Peter Gabriel – I/O (Dark-Side Mixes)

The first full-length studio release of new material from Peter Gabriel since 2002's Up features contributions from Ai Weiwei, Nick Cave, Olafur Eliasson, Henry Hudson, Annette Messager, Antony Micallef, David Moreno, Cornelia Parker, Megan Rooney, Tim Shaw, David Spriggs and Barthélémy Toguo.

Available as two versions, musically, the songs are identical. But the "Bright Side" feels like you are listening to the album with your blinds open, while the "Dark Side" feels like you are listening with your blinds shut.

Patched together from sessions in Britain, Italy, South Africa, Sweden and onstage at Rexall Place, it’s to I/O’s immense credit that it doesn’t feel like an album that’s been endlessly, if intermittently, reworked over decades. It’s all clearly carefully considered, but it still sounds remarkably fresh as it touches, lightly, on a variety of Gabriel’s longstanding preoccupations.

On the tour that accompanied the gradual release of I/O’s tracks online – one every full moon – Gabriel performed his new material alongside the big hits from 1986’s So.

If there’s nothing here as obviously commercial as Sledgehammer or Don’t Give Up, there’s definitely a hint of 80s brashness about the horns on the bright-hued Olive Tree and an epic, stadium-ready grandeur to the title track. His interest in music from beyond the west is reflected in the sinuous rhythm of This Is Home. You would struggle to describe And Still as prog rock per se, but its piano, flute and cello certainly trades in the kind of rain-spattered, very English melancholy that was among early 70s Genesis’s key modes.

It’s dense and rewarding and has more interesting things to say than the earnest but pat song titles – Live and Let Live, Love Can Heal – suggest. Anyone wondering at the wisdom of releasing an album consisting of songs already freely available to stream might note that, lunar-influenced drip-fed release or not, it’s clearly been conceived as an album: listened to in one sitting, it ebbs and flows beautifully.

2 x Vinyl, LP, Gatefold

Tracklist:
A1 Panopticom 5:16
A2 Playing For Time 6:17
A3 The Court 4:21
B1 Four Kinds Of Horses 6:47
B2 I/O 3:52
B3 Love Can Heal 5:59
C1 Road To Joy 5:21
C2 So Much 4:51
C3 Olive Tree 5:58
D1 This Is Home 5:04
D2 And Still 7:42
D3 Live And Let Live 7:11