The Book of Love. Peter Gabriel. 2010. Real World/Virgin.
The broad range of musical styles typified by the Peter Gabriel songbook suggests a serious pop artist with a keen curiosity and creative intelligence always at work. Like the David Bowie catalog, Gabriel’s studio output vacillates from material with broad commercial appeal to art rock experimentation. He was a fixed and always welcome presence on FM American radio before the video generation made him a global superstar, as if by some freak-inspired unanimity it had been decreed that what our young, drug and alcohol soaked imaginations needed was his personal, always elegantly narrated nightmares. Released in 2010, Scratch My Back is Gabriel’s dual artist project that had him covering a variety of songs by artists who then each recorded a Peter Gabriel song. For The Magnetic Fields’ The Book of Love, from their majestic 1999 tour de force 69 Love Songs, Gabriel turns his vocal maturity into a studio tool as effective as any electronic or acoustic device for adding a layer o...