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Mostly, it works well. Intriguingly, Gabriel fares better with more recent material.
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Ultimately this is not the artistic disaster it could have been, for despite some uncertainties it is clear Peter Gabriel has plenty of original thoughts to add to these songs.
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It's a decent enough, darkly-shaded mainstream pop album, but the concept is distracting.
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His voice, still a dynamic instrument that can leap from meek to menacing, is very much out front, prowling over spare, sometimes lugubrious reworkings. At the album’s best, the results are head-spinning....At its worst, a few songs feel plodding and insular.
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Gabriel’s decision to pay homage to the core essentials underpinning these songs is a noble one, he also sacrifices many essential ingredients: rhythmic drive, dynamic surprise, harmonic and textural variety. As experiments go, Scratch My Back ranks as a well-intentioned dud.
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Much of this material feels beneath him. What doesn't initially is brought down to that level by an absence of any real idea of how to give these songs a distinctive cast.
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Scratch comes off like a ponderous exercise in re-branding--an uncomfortable place to be for one of pop’s great innovators.
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This tribute to 12 of Peter Gabriel's favorite songwriters is a cool idea that turns into a stone bore.
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Is this the groundbreaking work we'd perhaps hoped for during the album's initial release, an effort worthy of that preliminary giddiness? Sadly, no. Is it an interesting mix of tracks that confronts listeners with reimaging of songs so deeply tied to our heart strings we have no choice but to carefully imbibe and evaluate each note? Sure.
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Every song on Scratch My Back, regardless of its original tone or meaning, is flattened out and turned into this one melodramatic and depressing thing, often with Gabriel whispering half the words to go with the ultra-slow tempos.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 22 out of 38
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Mixed: 6 out of 38
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Negative: 10 out of 38
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ManuelF.Mar 2, 2010Gets better and better everytime you listen to it. not just any album of covers, fantastic rendition to an eclectic selection. Masterpiece
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Oct 24, 2013
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Jan 11, 2011