My Amazon Reviews: Various Artists "I'll Scratch Yours - A Tribute to Peter Gabriel"

Mutual Scratching Society
3 Out Of 5 Stars

Although it took him three years to pull it together, Peter Gabriel at last put his "Scratch My Back - And I'll Scratch Yours" out as a whole piece. Initially designed to be a collaborative project, Gabriel gets 10 of his "Scratch My Back" artists to add their voices to a select Gabriel song, with varying results. (You may also quibble about Bryan Eno subbing for David Bowie, but it does up the collabs; the missing links are Neil Young and Radiohead.) If you don't already have "Scratch My Back," I highly recommend getting the limited edition two CD issue.

One of the things that held my rating back of the initial album was that Gabriel had set all his choices to orchestral arrangements (he did the same to himslef on "New Blood"), which kept the album's pace to a crawl. Fortunately for "I'll Scratch Yours," the collaborators had no such imposition. It varies the album considerably and offers a few surprises. For starters is the realization that anything Randy Newman touches sounds like Randy Newman, from the dry wit of the vocals to the piano playing, and he turns "Big Time" from the ironically pop MTV hit into the biting commentary that the lyrics had posited all along.

My other favorite here is Lou Reed turning "Solisbury Hill" from Gabriel's gathering of courage in a pastoral setting into a dingy echo laden guitar look into the mean streets of New York City (and may be one of Reed's last recordings). The criminally underrated Elbow take one of my all-time favorite Gabriel songs, "Mercy Street," and do an uncanny sound-alike version. Stephin Merrit (Magnetic Fields) stamps the paranoia out from underneath "Not One Of Us" and makes it sound like a bubbly synth-pop record from the 80's. And finally, Paul Simon turns "Biko," a song I thought I was tired of, into an acoustic folk anthem.

Those are the hits. There are a couple of misses; Brian Eno doesn't do anything to make "Mother Of Violence" interesting. Bon Iver tries as hard as he can to sound interesting, but remains a bore to listen to. David Byrne uses his falsetto on "I Don't Remember" to make you remember what nails on chalkboard sounds like. But that's only three real duds. The remainder of the songs, from the likes of Feist, Arcade Fire and Regina Spektor at least show that Gabriel hasn't lost his taste for new artists and that his songwriting transcends formats. Taken together, "Scratch My Back and I'll Scratch Yours" is a good pair of bookends and a fine tribute to Gabriel's multi-decade career.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Elvis Costello and The Roots "Wise Up Ghost

DNA Splicing
4 Out Of 5 Stars

"Wise Up Ghost." In which two of the music world's encyclopedic nerds play with Costello's past and Questlove's concepts of pop and funk. Musically it is a fascinating record, with the two of them combining bits of Elvis' older tunes with deeply funked out basslines, boiling things to a rare essence; the songs that equal or surpass the originals.

For example, just as deep as the second song, sample lyrics from "Sweet Underground" and "Hurry Down Doomsday" are tangled together to create "Sugar Won't Work." Or how "Stick Out Your Tongue" rewrites "Pills and Soap," one of Costello's angriest protest songs. Which is something else to note about "Wise Up Ghost." The Roots place a lot of dark menace into songs that weren't as sinister as they were when they started out life.

Even the samples spin things around. The tinkling piano of "Satellite" tease "Tripwire" into a more spooky area, along with the subject matter. Questlove and Elvis don't just stick with the lyrical cut and pasting, songs are pulled into the sampler like "Satellite," as well as "Radio Silence" on the (bonus track version) "Can You Hear Me."

It's not like Elvis hasn't explored collaborations and re-visiting before. This comes closer to "The River In Reverse," with Allen Toussaint and the roaring Stax romp of "Get Happy" than other Costello works, while The Roots bring out the moments when Costello becomes more a sublime singer, even though there's more than a little menace to the demanding title track or "Stick Out Your Tongue." "Wise Up Ghost" may sound like a mismatch of talents, but The Roots make this album into one of Costello's most interesting in a long time.