Gabriel's masterwork. Stunning and highly recommended.

After two albums of exploration, Peter Gabriel finally developed a uniqueness awway from Genesis and settled on a direction-- haunting, paranoid, frightening. As though some internal torment needed to be exorcised.



Usually regarded as Gabriel's best, Peter Gabriel 3 is superb. Longtime guitarist David Rhodes joins Tony Levin, Larry Fast and Jerry Marotta as the primary backing band on this record, augmented at times by none less than Robert Fripp, Kate Bush, and Phil Collins (back when he was still a drummer).



The music starts off dark and haunting, "Intruder", a first person narrative about breaking into someone's home. The album maintains this feeling, both from an internal standpoint ("No Self-Control", "I Don't Remember") and external ("Games Without Frontiers", "Not One of Us"). The material rocks like little else, and its nature suits Gabriel well. The dark chant of "No Self Control", the energetic confusion and horror of "I Don't Remember", the venom in the delivery of "Games Without Frontiers"... the material inspires Gabriel. Instrumentally, its filled with odd bursts of guitars and percussion, sometimes wrapping around itself. Still, as great as these songs are, none of them can begin to compare to what I consider to be Gabriel's greatest song, "Family Snapshot". Starting soft and delicate, and building, saxaphone screaming along with Gabriel's voice, the externalized horror of an assassin, climaxing with the moment of assassination, then dribblign into a feeling of loneliness and hopelessness. It paints a sympathetic picture of a man who is so desparate for attention, he'll kill for it. As powerful as it is, few moments are as stunning as Gabriel's whimpering "Come back mom and dad" over a delicate fretless bass.



The end of the record takes the aggression out of the introspection, the delicate beauty of "Lead a Normal Life" and the powerful tribute, "Biko", similar in feel to "Here Comes the Flood" off of the the car album, builds until gaining anthemic power. "Biko" also paints the way to the future for Gabriel, with its tribal-esque percussion and chants.



This is really superb, one of the best of its genre. Highly recommended.

The remaster is EXCEPTIONAL...

Of all the remastered Peter Gabriel recordings, this one sounds most outstanding. I expected Security to be the stunner (and surely its remaster sounds really good), but Melt is virtually transformed into a new album.



If you give it a crank and check out Intruder, you'll hear a whole new level of intrigue and atmosphere right away, but then it's No Self Control that will blow the doors off the previous version of the CD, and it pretty much never lets up after that. (I'd never been so crazy about I Don't Remember before, but the new mix really brings it to life - the transformation is THAT profound.) The textural and percussive detail are simply beyond belief, and the vocal depth taken to a whole new level.



In short, if you own the catalogue already, I'd say this one is the MOST worth buying AGAIN. Though Security's overhaul was woefully overdue, so perhaps buy the pair. Especially since many would consider these PG's strongest two "mainstream" albums (setting aside the soundtracks into a wonderful category all their own.)



For those that don't know this record at all, it's a fantastic accomplishment of "dark pop," mixing fundamental pop hooks, grooves, and anthems with a simmering borderline hysteria and anxiety. There's one track that deeply annoys me (still), but the overall accomplishment is historic, truly a document of the creeping trauma and injustice of the latter 20th Century. (Check out Games Without Frontiers and/or No Self Control to get a feel for the album's "voice," and then deeper, darker tracks will surprise you further upon a full listen.)



If you're new to PG altogether, I'm not sure I'd recommend this one as a FIRST buy. It's extraordinary, no doubt, but if you're inclined toward "more accessible" pop, you might try So or Us, both great records but more "easy-going" than Melt. Or, if you're inclined to explore the most thunderously ambitious work he's ever done, definitely check out Security, one of the great 5-star albums of all time, especially now that it's been remastered.

THIS is why Peter Gabriel left Genesis.

I know that most people say that if you listen to "Solsbury Hill," you'll hear why Peter Gabriel had to leave Genesis. I, however, feel that it was on his third solo album that Gabriel truly established himself as a solo artist. The penchant for musical exploration that we see on his first album is present on this one, as well as Gabriel's newly discovered fondness for disturbing subject matter and ethnic rock, first glimpsed on his second album. But here we have a more mature artist than the one we saw on the first two albums. Finally, there is a strong cohesion between the songs, a center of thematic unity. You should be warned: there isn't a single lighthearted moment on this album. Every single dark facet of the human mind, the shadowy recesses of the soul that everyone possesses to some degree (but doesn't like to think about), they are all explored throughout this album. But Gabriel's songwriting expertise actually manages to make the experience an engaging one.



The opening song, Intruder, makes it clear that we're entering a dark world. In true Peter Gabriel fashion, it's a bizarre opener, albeit a bit darker than what we're used to. But still, Gabriel uses his powers of composition to make it delightful, in a sick way. The disjointed, yet solid melody, coupled with Gabriel's treatment of the lyrics (muttering one moment, crying out the next, with just the right amount of feedback to give his voice a more shadowy quality) reel the listener in. One almost gets a sense that Gabriel has assumed the role of the stalker almost too well. It's enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, and yet, it's artistic enough to grab your attention. It's not the last time Gabriel sings in the first person. In the following song, No Self-Control, he assumes the role of an obsessed man, again with frightening accuracy. And as in the last song, the music only heightens the unease. The driving percussion, combined with the sudden, bursting guitar riffs almost become a rhythmic, impulsive chant. He also plays the role of amnesiac in I Don't Remember, a song made even more terrifying by the fact that Gabriel might be suggesting that society itself, and the drives to conform, are the reasons that we have lost our identities. And in this song, we also hear Gabriel drifting further into modern rock than he has before, with outstanding results.



In addition to moments of artistic funk rock, we are also given hints of the direction Gabriel will go for the rest of his solo career. We hear African soul influences in the percussion throughout. Sometimes, as in Lead a Normal Life, it's keyed down. Or, by contrast, you have the vivid, multilayered percussion of Games Without Frontiers, a chilling song about how people are subconsciously conditioned to fight wars as adults through the games they play as children, complete with eerie backing vocals from singer Kate Bush (who would work with Gabriel again). We hear soft pop traces within the tragic beauty of Family Snapshot (a profile of a murderer, or a suggestion that said murderer is, to some degree, every man?), which is probably the one time on the album Gabriel is blatantly TRYING to make the listener cry. We hear modern jazz-rock within the sad reflective tones of Start, an instrumental consisting only of a keyboard synthesizer, bass, and sax. Gabriel is still exploring, but through the darkness of the subject matter, we get a unifying theme. We get Gabriel's penchant for experimentation (with a more solid focus), and through songs like I Don't Remember, Family Snapshot and Lead a Normal Life, we also get an idea of the direction Gabriel wanted his career to take during the 1980s.



Finally, after the dark, brooding journey through the bleak recesses of the mind, Gabriel ends the song on a surprising note: Biko, an anti-apartheid song dealing with the murder of South African civil rights leader Steven Bantu Biko, and how his death only strengthened his cause by making him a martyr ("the man is dead, and the eyes of the world are watching now"). The song is rich, insightful, and spiritually uplifting. The influences of African music on Gabriel shine through in both the music and the vocals. Gabriel embraces them, honors them while also giving them his own stamp, and the end result is one of the most beautiful, poignant songs of his career. It's also interesting to note that this song got the distribution of Gabriel's music banned from South Africa for many years.



If one listens to this album, one will hear the real reason Peter Gabriel left Genesis. Gabriel matured as both a solo artist and a songwriter on this album, stepping light-years beyond his progressive roots, while at the same time doing them justice. The album is bleak, insightful, disturbing, shocking, delightful, morbid, and beautiful all at the same time. While Gabriel would go on to prove his expertise as a pop artist during the 80s, nothing else he would do for the rest of his career would measure up to the rich expertise he displays on this album. There's a very good reason critics and fans consider this his masterpiece, and through it, Gabriel established himself as one of the best modern artists of our time.