Send "Peter Gabriel " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 What's he doing here? That was the first question that came to mind when a cover of Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" showed up on blogs in 2008, featuring Peter Gabriel's familiar voice singing lead over Hot Chip's backing: "Feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too," goes the oft-quoted refrain, to which Gabriel added, "And it feels so unnatural/ To sing your own name."It was surprising because Gabriel seemed like the kind of artist who would remain blissfully ignorant of the changes that have befallen the music business in the years since he released his last album, Up, in 2002. Somewhere between the time of the smash So in 1986 and the launch of the Human Rights Now! tour in 1988, Gabriel seemed to transcend the pop machine. He'd undertake offbeat projects (scoring films like The Last Temptation of Christ, making an early stab at interactive art with the EVE CD-ROM), release an album or two when he felt like it, mount the occasional tour, and appear on the odd film or TV soundtrack. But with his graying hair, air of intelligent dignity, and avoidance of celebrity trappings, he was the rare pop star who didn't seem to mind losing relevance or growing old. The last place you expected this guy to show up was singing lead on a blog-bait Vampire Weekend cover. If nothing else, that Hot Chip cameo mitigated the shock that otherwise came with news that Gabriel's next full-length, Scratch My Back, would be a covers record, featuring songs by Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and the Magnetic Fields, along with work by Gabriel contemporaries like David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Paul Simon. From the outset, it sounded like an idea dreamed up by a management team, a way to introduce Gabriel to the coveted New Generation of Listeners. But a recent interview on The Quietus, where Gabriel ran down the song selections and explained how he was introduced to each, reveled the project's organic roots....full text |
| Bbc |
| "It feels so unnatural / to sing your own name," sang Peter Gabriel last year, lending his voice to Hot Chip's cover of Vampire Weekend's Gabriel name-checking Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa. The point seems to have extended to singing his own songs, as he starts the new decade with a collection of beautifully recorded covers that renege on guitars and drums in favour of an orchestra arranged by The Durutti Column's John Metcalfe. Indeed, the ads for Gabriel's two nights at the 02 boast "No guitars! No drums!" It seems he doesn't need them – the results here are stunning. Scratch My Back is the first offering of a two-part project. The second will be released later in the year and, as you might have guessed, will be called I'll Scratch Yours. On it, the artists featured here will return the favour on Gabriel tracks. It's a pop swap shop. The result of this is that many songs here, like Elbow's Mirrorball, are fairly modern, and Gabriel rarely dips into the obvious rock canon (Heroes aside). And the sparseness of the arrangements around the singer’s tender vocals makes this a thing of beauty. During the chorus of Bon Iver's Flume he sounds close to tears as he wrings the words out. On Paul Simon's The Boy in the Bubble – originally an upbeat song – Gabriel takes the lyrical juxtaposition of poverty/modernity and milks the sadness that Simon had hidden. ...full text |
| Guardian |
| The covers album has a bad reputation: it is seen as something that gets released in lieu of something else, evidence that a songwriter's creative juices have dried up. In the case of Peter Gabriel, that's a state of affairs compounded by the fact that he's released only two full-length studio albums in the last 20 years. But Scratch My Back suggests that may have more to do with perfectionism than lack of inspiration. He slows the songs' tempos and sets them to string arrangements that range from filmic and lush to something approaching the icy screech essayed by John Cale on Nico's Marble Index. This emphasises his voice's oft-overlooked soulfulness on a glorious version of Elbow's Mirrorball, and unexpectedly teases out a fatalistic misery from David Bowie's Heroes. Not everything responds to the heartfelt treatment – he plays The Magnetic Fields' The Book of Love dead straight, losing the song's deadpan ambiguity – but you'd be hard pushed indeed to posit Scratch My Back as evidence of declining creativity....full text |
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