Peter Gabriel's new single and video, "The Barry Williams Show," has a great beat, a tight melody, tremendous production, and it stinks to high heaven. In it, he takes on trash talk shows. How very ten years ago of him. I'm not sure if it's his age or his ivory-tower status, but he comes across as painfully behind the times here, stating the obvious in an obvious way. Couldn't he have made another album about relationships? Because "Secret World" still hits me in the gut. Or, how about a concept album about how it feels to be 52 years old and skirting musical irrelevance with his every breath? That could have been fun, and would almost certainly have been more fitting than singing headlines from a rag he found in a forgotten closet. Hopefully, I'm misplacing my agression, and the rest of the album sounds nothing like this song.
On the upside, that creepy grey swirled goatee does win the "Facial Hair of the Year" award, hands down.
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