Music / Up (Peter Gabriel Album)

"I woke up and the world outside was dark."

Up is the seventh studio album recorded by English art pop musician Peter Gabriel. It was released through Real World Records in the United Kingdom, and Geffen Records in North America, on 23 September 2002.

Coming out a whole decade after his previous album, owing to a highly protracted production that started all the way back in 1995, this release marks a shift back to the bleak, aggressive art rock style of Melt while retaining the atmosphere and introspection of Gabriel's other releases. At the same time, Up foregoes most of its predecessors' World Music elements in favor of an industrial-tinged direction, while also ramping up the Progressive Rock-based structural elements characteristic of both Gabriel's early material and his material with Genesis. True to Gabriel's longtime affinity for taking advantage of evolving technology in music, Up was produced using then-new digital audio workstation software, allowing for a far greater amount of musical and artistic flexibility than what was previously possible with the drum machines and Fairlight CMI that dominated his '80s and '90s material.

In the vein of Us and its recurring themes of failing relationships, Up is a Concept Album examining the duality of birth and death, with particularly strong emphasis on the latter in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. Much of the album's tone was also influenced by the September 11 attacks that occurred near the tail end of production; while the songs were written long before the attacks, the event nonetheless resulted in Gabriel revising the tone of the album to more adequately express the feelings of grief, fear, shock, and anger that followed the destruction of the Twin Towers, dedicating "I Grieve" in particular to the countless people who had no idea what became of their loved ones during the attacks (Gabriel himself being one of them— his daughters were in New York City on 9/11, and he was unable to contact them for a good while afterwards, leaving a lasting impression even after they turned out to be alive and well).

Upon release, Up was a commercial success, topping the Italian Albums chart and peaking at No. 11 in the UK and No. 9 on both the Billboard 200 and Billboard's Top Internet Albums chart. The album would later be certified gold in Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, as well as silver in the UK. Conversely, it was also Gabriel's last album of original material until 2023, with the intended sequel to Up, i/o, releasing throughout the year after two decades of delays owing to Gabriel's self-admitted Attention Deficit Creator Disorder. Gabriel's actual next two albums, 2010's Scratch My Back and 2011's New Blood, were respectively a Cover Album and a collection of orchestral re-recordings of his previous songs.

Up was supported by four singles: "The Barry Williams Show", "More Than This", "Growing Up", and a Switzerland-only release of "Darkness".

Tracklist:

1. "Darkness" (6:51)
2. "Growing Up" (7:33)
3. "Sky Blue" (6:37)
4. "No Way Out" (7:53)
5. "I Grieve" (7:25)
6. "The Barry Williams Show" (7:16)
7. "My Head Sounds Like That" (6:29)
8. "More Than This" (6:02)
9. "Signal to Noise" (7:36)
10. "The Drop" (2:59)

My tropes like to travel:

• Album Title Drop: Occurs frequently throughout "Growing Up".
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: The central theme of the album. "Growing Up" particularly uses this to heavy effect as a form of bookending the song, with the first and last verses respectively describing the narrator being born and dying.
• Boléro Effect: "Signal to Noise" starts as a quiet string piece, but builds in intensity as it progresses, ending in a cacophonic series of "Psycho" Strings.
• Book Ends:
  • The first verse of "Growing Up" features the narrator elaborately describing the process of gestating and being born. The last verse of the song, meanwhile, describes the process of dying and ascending to heaven in a similarly flowery manner.
  • Car, Gabriel's first album, featured a cover photo of a car in the rain, covered in water droplets. Up, Gabriel's last completed album of original material until 2023, features five water droplets on the cover. Both albums additionally feature the involvement of Bob Ezrin, Car having been produced by him and Up featuring brass arrangements by him on "My Head Sounds Like That".
• Concept Album: Up focuses heavily on birth and especially death.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the already-bleak Us, Up is even more dour, additionally returning to the aggressive style of Melt from over two decades prior.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The album's front cover, back cover, and liner notes.
• Design Student's Orgasm:
  • Subtle, but still noteworthy, with the album cover placing considerable emphasis on the refracted faces in the five water droplets, with a blurry portrait of Gabriel gazing upon them from the background.
  • Like Us a decade prior, the liner notes also feature unique artwork for each song made by a variety of artists, this time more heavily centered around photography; also in the vein of Us, the art for "Growing Up" and "The Barry Williams Show" would be reused for their single releases in a modified format.
• Downer Ending: The already dark Up closes with "The Drop", a melancholic, minor-key Lonely Piano Piece that uses a story of watching skydivers falling without knowing where they'll land as a metaphor for uncertainty in a post-9/11 world.
• Epic Rocking: Nearly every track on the album surpasses the six-minute mark; "The Drop" is the only song that averts this, being just a second under three minutes long. The album itself is also noteworthy for its runtime: at 66:40, it was Gabriel's longest studio album until the 77:41 New Blood in 2011, and in terms of his albums of original material it's still his longest.
• Face on the Cover: A blurry Gabriel gazing at five falling waterdrops, each of which refract his face.
• Grief Song: "No Way Out" and "I Grieve" act as a two-part examination of the grieving process, the former being about pre-mortem grief and the latter about post-mortem grief.
• Idiosyncratic Cover Art: Similarly to Us, the singles released for Up feature palette swaps of the album's CD label art for their own releases on the format; the sole exception is "Darkness", which was only released as a 12".
• Ironic Name: An album full of downbeat songs is called Up. Gabriel discussed the irony in greater depth on his website:
  "'UP' is a positive word and I think if I listen to the music now there are some pretty miserable songs there so I don't know if it fits that well but I've sort of grown with it and I think personally I'm in a good place at the moment and probably more up than the previous couple of albums so maybe there is some relationship there but, I don't think there is so much relationship in the music itself. I've always found it harder to write happy music than sad music."
• Last Note Nightmare: "Signal to Noise" ends with the string section making a crescendo into a high-pitched cacophony.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: Up lacks the worldbeat overtones of preceding albums (with "Signal to Noise" being the only true worldbeat song on the entire record) and foregoes the sample-heavy nature of said albums in favor of exploring a more overtly electronic, industrial direction with orchestral trimmings.
• Lonely Piano Piece: "The Drop", consisting of just Gabriel and a Bösendorfer grand piano and bearing lyrical themes of uncertainty in the age of The War on Terror.
• Longest Song Goes Last: Inverted; the shortest track on the album, "The Drop", is the closing piece.
• Loudness War: At DR8, the album is mastered with much less headroom than Gabriel's previous albums and even the concurrent remasters of his back-catalog. It's not as bad as many other examples from the era, but it's still a sharp contrast when compared to the rest of Gabriel's output at that point.
• Metal Scream: Gabriel pulls of a fairly impressive one during the outro to "Signal to Noise".
• Minimalistic Cover Art: Not on the album cover itself (if only because of the refracted faces in the water drops), but the CD label art◊ consists simply of a small, pinkish-red ring in the center hub, surrounded by small text listing Gabriel's name, the album title, and copyright information. The SACD release◊ adds slightly more in the way of an SACD logo and the record label logo at the bottom of the disc face.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The waterdrops refracting Gabriel's face on the album cover hark back to the cover for Security, itself made using image refraction via flexible mirrors and Fresnel lenses.
  • "Sky Blue" quotes portions of "Cloudless" and "Ngankarrparni" from Gabriel's earlier soundtrack to Rabbit-Proof Fence; these same quotations had also previously been featured in "The Nest That Sailed The Sky" off of OVO, Gabriel's soundtrack to the Cirque du Soleil-inspired Millennium Dome Show in 2000.
  • The title of "More Than This" harks back to a line in "That Voice Again".
• New Sound Album: Industrial-tinged art rock with heavy emphasis on digital audio workstation technology.
• Non-Appearing Title: "Signal to Noise" (the phrase "turn up the signal, wipe out the noise" appears, but not the title phrase verbatim), "The Drop".
• One-Word Title: Up, "Darkness".
• Please, Don't Leave Me: "No Way Out" is narrated by someone dreading the impending death of a loved one, begging them to hang on to life to no avail.
• Point-and-Laugh Show: "The Barry Williams Show" is narrated by the host of one.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The title character of "The Barry Williams Show" takes no qualms with inviting openly misogynist and anti-LGBT+ guests onto his show.
• Posthumous Collaboration: The guest vocalist for "Signal to Noise", Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, had died just a year into the album's production from obesity complications, without having gotten the chance to actually record his vocal part for the song. He did, however, perform a live rendition with Gabriel shortly before his passing, and it was from this that Gabriel sourced the audio for his part on the studio version.
• "Psycho" Strings: "Signal to Noise" closes out with a discordant mass of high-pitched strings.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • While the album had been in production since 1995, much of the tone of the final product was influenced by 9/11 and the mixture of shock, grief, and rage that everyone felt in the wake of that.
  • "Growing Up" was partly inspired by the death of Gabriel's brother-in-law from cancer, as well as the deaths of a couple of his close friends.
• Scare Chord: "Darkness" begins rather quietly, with a few noises here and there, before suddenly going very loud - and then back to being quiet again.
• Scatting: "Signal to Noise" features extended passages of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan doing an Arabesque take on this, drawing from his lifelong career as a Qawwali singer.
• Siamese Twin Songs: "No Way Out" and "I Grieve"; the former features the narrator grappling with the rapidly-approaching death of a loved one, while the latter examines the aftermath of the death.
• The Space Race: Alluded to by the cover art for the single release of "More Than This", which is a photograph of an astronaut's footprint on the lunar surface.
• Special Guest: ...hoo boy. Up has far more of these than any of Gabriel's previous albums, to the point where trying to list them all would be wildly impractical. Here are a few particularly standout ones:
  • King Crimson bassist and longtime Gabriel collaborator Tony Levin plays bass on "Darkness", "Sky Blue", "No Way Out", "I Grieve", "The Barry Williams Show", "My Head Sounds Like That", and "More Than This".
  • New Order, Pet Shop Boys, and Erasure collaborator Stephen Hague plays percussion on "I Grieve".
  • Long-running American gospel group the Blind Boys of Alabama provide guest vocals on "Sky Blue" and "More Than This"; they also did backing vocals on "Burn You Up, Burn You Down", which was included on promotional copies of the album but ultimately cut from the final release.
  • Former Pink Floyd collaborator Bob Ezrin, who previously produced Gabriel's debut album, provides brass arrangements for "My Head Sounds Like That".
  • Pakistani Qawwali singer and Real World Records labelmate Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan provides guest vocals on "Signal to Noise"— despite the fact that he'd been dead for five years by the time the song released. Gabriel had to scrap together archival audio from an early live performance of the song when it was time to record it in the studio.
• Splash of Color: The small magenta ring at the center of the CD label contrasts the otherwise blank disc face, which reveals the metallic gray color of the disc's aluminum reflective layer.
• Surreal Horror: Done at the end of the video for "The Barry Williams Show", where the audience spontaneously starts gushing blood from their skin, turning the studio onto a swimming pool of blood that Williams ultimately falls into.
• Surreal Music Video: "Growing Up" and the latter portion of "The Barry Williams Show".
• Take That!: "The Barry Williams Show" is an open condemnation of The Jerry Springer Show and the Point-and-Laugh Show as a whole.
• Textless Album Cover: Well, not on the main cover; the artist name and album title appears in the area of the tray card beneath the spine of the transparent tray.
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: One guest on "The Barry Williams Show" laments the fact that "[his] girl became a man."
• Viewers Are Geniuses: "Signal to Noise" derives its name and lyrics from the signal-to-noise ratio, a measurement of audio clarity that compares the volume of desired audio to the volume of background hiss.
• Villain Protagonist: The titular host of "The Barry Williams Show", who openly brags about making a highly successful living off of exploiting highly dysfunctional people on live TV.
• What You Are in the Dark: "The Barry Williams Show" touts the exposure of this as a selling point for the eponymous program, describing it as "where people say the things that they really mean."

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