Album: Peter Gabriel

Up, Realworld

Though the Millennium Dome performance score OVO, live album Secret World Live and more recently the film soundtrack Long Walk Home are testament to his constant industry, Up is the first "real" Peter Gabriel solo album – ie, the first with actual songs, and a substantial degree of personal emotional investment – since 1992's Us. And judging by the terrifying sampled roars that introduce the opening track "Darkness", it sounds as if it was indeed torn from his very soul, to leave behind the kind of gaping wounds for which he's become justly renowned.

As before, the title hints at the contents: where Us was about relationships, Up is full of songs about growing up, and going up to heaven, about flying and dying. Thus is "Darkness" about childhood – though this being Gabriel, it's about the fears, rather than the fun and fairy tale fantasies, of childhood, with the infant stalked by the predatory stomp of monsters, struggling to overcome his terror and eventually triumphing over it. From there, it's all upwards – the lumbering funk groove "Growing Up" is about finding one's place in the universe, and "Sky Blue" – a lovely piano and percussion piece laced with guitar – about how he has to "keep moving to be stable"; leading to the closer "The Drop", which finds Gabriel watching parachutists jumping from his plane, one by one – a metaphor, perhaps, for the way family and friends start to fall away, lose touch or die, as one grows older.

The album deals most impressively with the process of ageing and death: "Signal to Noise" considers the struggle to surmount the obfuscating background "noise" of life, the better to perceive that which is truly important, while "No Way Out" and "I Grieve" are two of pop's most mature reflections on bereavement. The first captures perfectly the fear of losing a loved one while the second creeps agonisingly towards some sort of "closure".

It may not cover the most cheerful of territory, but Up makes the journey with great poise and grace. As usual, the basic rock-band backings are coloured with subtle pan-stylistic tints, ranging from Danny Thompson's double bass, driving the slinky latin-jazz shuffle of "No Way Out" languidly along, to the blend of Arvo Part-ish strings, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's Qawwali wailing and the clatter of the Dhol Foundation drummers that comprises "Signal To Noise". The only point at which the album slips below its otherwise high standard is the single "The Barry Williams Show", a satire on a reality-TV host which offers no great insights; apart from that, Up is a fine, mature work, up there with Gabriel's best.