…shining a little light on what we’re spinning on the office stereo.

The promotional copies of No Great Lost arrived late last week, so the past seven days have been a flurry of envelope stuffing, trips to the post office, envelope addressing (we do it all by hand here), and last-minute research. Actually a great time for music-listening, because the long hours have insured that we’ve said everything to one another that we have to say, and we need some entertainment of “the moving air variety” (as Kevin Dunn would say) to keep morale up. So we’ve been alternating repeated spins of No Great Lost with a variety of other things, namely…

The Peter Gabriel catalog. His newest album had us hankering to explore his prior audio footprints, so we’ve broken out some untouched promo copies of his first few albums, which we got back when the whole shebang was remastered and reissued. Classy job on all of them, with nice matte-finished booklets and coherent design running through each installment. Cool photos, vintage press clippings, etc. Easy on the eyes. And the original cover art still looks fantastic: a testament to his forward-thinking vision and (probably more so) the genius of design firm Hipgnosis. So far we’ve listened to his first three records, all called Peter Gabriel (love it).

And, well…we’re kinda bummed by how stiff and art-rocky these disks are. Recording, performance, songwriting – all state-of-the-art for their respective eras, and yet everything seems quite labored and mannered. The first was helmed by Canadian mega-rock producer Bob Erzin (Alice Cooper, KISS, Pink Floyd, etc.) and has its share of bombast, despite the occasional pop song (“Modern Love”). You can tell Gabriel was itching to break free of the limitations/pretensions of his old band Genesis: there’s barbershop quartet singing, simmering R&B, and huge, overwrought epics of doom. It’s interesting, but it just feels so damned serious, even when it’s supposed to be funny. That said, “Solsbury Hill” is a tremendous song, and perhaps the most natural pop song ever composed in 7/4 time.

The second Peter Gabriel was produced by Bob Fripp (who curiously doesn’t seem to play on the record), and has a much lighter touch. There’s some awfully dated saxophone towards the end, but otherwise the sound is relatively fresh. That said, few of the songs really hang onto the ears once they are done – “DIY” is an odd acknowledgment of punk ethos (in 5/4) and is catchy, as is “A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World,” but there’s a reason this is probably the least-remembered of Gabriel’s early work.

The third, on the other ear, seems to be the most fondly thought of record of the trilogy, and with good reason. It’s true that some of the goofy humor of the first record is gone, making the album almost claustrophobically dry, but befitting of Gabriel’s themes of international injustice and personal violation. There’s still a little sax, but it’s less annoyingly big-‘80s sounding. Paul Weller plays guitar on a genuinely catchy bit of quasi-pop called “And Through the Wire.” “No Self Control” is a pretty chilling account of obsessive compulsion, and “I Don’t Remember” and “Games Without Frontiers” are insightful and catchy in a way that his stuff hadn’t really been up until now. It seems like the punk/new-wave revolution inspired him to streamline the music (with the help of producer Steve Lillywhite), making for a sleeker, more accessible sound. For us, “Family Snapshot” is where it all comes together, painting a picture at once universally terrifying and incredibly personal: a tiny epic. Can’t call this an easy one to listen to, but it’s one we’re likely to return to.

Part of this journey into Gabriel entailed dredging up an old vinyl copy of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the last album he made with Genesis. It has been described as a difficult record to create, and Christgau famously noted that its jacket probably had more words (lyrics plus an extensive bit of exposition on the plot) than any prior rock LP. Honestly, though, we got a big kick out of it. Prog rock such as this was undoubtedly considered pretentious and insufferable in its day, but to modern ears the combination of primitive synths, odd meters, and rambling song structures seems kind of quaint: a charmingly old-world attempt to kick at the boundaries of what was rock’n’roll. Genesis always seemed to us the lightest and most nimble of prog bands, less prone to grand gestures even in the midst of a 20-minute song (which often seemed like six-and-one-half three-minute songs, anyway). Lamb is incredibly enjoyable, with a surprisingly high quotient of rollicking pop scattered among its four sides.

In other listening, we just got Brian Harnetty’s Silent City album, which on first listen really captivated – blending simple, ominous (yet extraordinarily well-performed) instrumental gestures with field recordings from the Appalachian Field Archives in Berea, KY and really powerful vocals by Will Oldham. This apparently came out last August, but we somehow missed it until now. We also got our hands on the new Omar Khorshid anthology from Sublime Frequencies…Khorshid was an Egyptian guitarist who melded traditional forms with surf and beat influences. His virtuosity is impressive, and the anthology is really well presented. On first listen, we didn’t quite get it, but then we realized that the turntable was set on 45. Restored to the proper speed, a lot of nuances, cool sonics, and subtleties came to the fore. D’oh.