**From The Telegraph’s Music Critic, Neil McCormick:**
Peter Gabriel is a genius. i/o is a masterpiece. That should be all you need to know before diving into his latest resplendent work, decades in the making. A sprawling yet gentle epic of the interconnectedness of everything, no record has beguiled me more all year, slowly sinking its multitude of intermingling musical hooks in me, wrapping me in tentacles of slippery sound and rhythms, moving me with soulful singing and all the while opening out to reveal new layers with every listen. It really is extraordinarily good. And so it should be, after the time it has taken him to make it.
i/o is Gabriel’s first album of original songs in 21 years, a project actually begun sometime in the mid-1990s. Sure, there have been tours, orchestral reimaginings of his own songs and those of others, film soundtracks, collaborations, CD-Roms (remember them?), and the distractions of running his own digital distribution network, world music festival Womad, Real World record label and recording studio complex. Nevertheless, spending decades recording, reworking and re-recording an album’s worth of new material might suggest a crisis of confidence in his own creativity, none of which is apparent in the luscious finished article.
Rather than being overworked to ruin, i/o feels distilled to its philosophical essence whilst being gilded with layer after layer of beautiful detail. Synths ripple and shimmer, drums flicker and pound, guitars slash and tickle, horns burst, African rhythms wind through European grooves adorned with Asiatic instrumentation, orchestras swell magnificently as songs rise to bursting then retract to icily still piano, all stitched seamlessly together from sessions in the UK, Italy, Sweden, South Africa and Canada.
2 comments
**From The Telegraph’s Music Critic, Neil McCormick:**
Peter Gabriel is a genius. i/o is a masterpiece. That should be all you need to know before diving into his latest resplendent work, decades in the making. A sprawling yet gentle epic of the interconnectedness of everything, no record has beguiled me more all year, slowly sinking its multitude of intermingling musical hooks in me, wrapping me in tentacles of slippery sound and rhythms, moving me with soulful singing and all the while opening out to reveal new layers with every listen. It really is extraordinarily good. And so it should be, after the time it has taken him to make it.
i/o is Gabriel’s first album of original songs in 21 years, a project actually begun sometime in the mid-1990s. Sure, there have been tours, orchestral reimaginings of his own songs and those of others, film soundtracks, collaborations, CD-Roms (remember them?), and the distractions of running his own digital distribution network, world music festival Womad, Real World record label and recording studio complex. Nevertheless, spending decades recording, reworking and re-recording an album’s worth of new material might suggest a crisis of confidence in his own creativity, none of which is apparent in the luscious finished article.
Rather than being overworked to ruin, i/o feels distilled to its philosophical essence whilst being gilded with layer after layer of beautiful detail. Synths ripple and shimmer, drums flicker and pound, guitars slash and tickle, horns burst, African rhythms wind through European grooves adorned with Asiatic instrumentation, orchestras swell magnificently as songs rise to bursting then retract to icily still piano, all stitched seamlessly together from sessions in the UK, Italy, Sweden, South Africa and Canada.
**Read more ⤵️**
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/peter-gabriel-io-review-most-beguiling-album-of-2023/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/peter-gabriel-io-review-most-beguiling-album-of-2023/)
So wanted to see this years tour. An amazing performer as well.