I don’t want there to be any hard feelings between myself and Peter Gabriel. Yes, I ripped him a lot in those Genesis reviews for being a public school educated arthouse bore who hijacked a psychedelic sixth form guitar club for the purposes of his personal primal scream therapy, before obligingly fucking off and allowing used car salesman Phil Collins to spearhead the all-conquering yuppie rock act rebrand, praise god. And it remains an incontrovertible fact that post-Gabriel Genesis is a gazillion times more compelling than the puffed up progrock twattery that preceded it, and if you don’t agree, then you’re politely invited to close the browser and go back to reading your cum-flecked copy of The Sword of Shannara, you pencil-necked, quill-wielding prick.
But despite my undeniable animus against both the baleful Weltanschauung and the insufferable socio-moral milieu represented by prog in general and Gabriel’s Genesis in particular, I got nothing but love and respect for the man himself; after all, he is responsible for So, one of the best albums of the 80s and clearly the finest piece of work to emerge from the Whomping Willow-like “Genesis Family Tree.” Shockingly, however, the critical consensus apparently holds that Peter crafted an even better record than So: his 1980 breakthrough which, like all of his other early solo albums, was (with characteristically opaque pretentiousness) self-titled, and has retrospectively come to be known as Melt, presumably because the cover is a picture of its progenitor looking like Lewis Capaldi. As usual, though, the critical consensus is a load of mince, because Melt is not as good as So, though I will concede that there’s a discussion to be had, which is high praise in itself.
Melt’s sound is deranged art-pop, with lots of abrasive riffing, abundant synths, frenetically staccato melodies, and general weirdness. Its musical basis consists in hammered, spaced out, cymbal-free drumming, much of it done by Lovely Jubbly Phil, who very accommodatingly made room in his schedule to spend an afternoon in the studio in between skippering Genesis and selling stolen rugs out the back of a transit van. Decrepit classic rock windbags with unduly successful YouTube channels customarily append adjectives like “cavernous” and “hollowed out” to this sound, but the vibe is one of profound unease, like a middle-aged bank manager with a screw loose and a submachine gun in his top drawer trying hard not to shoot up the gaff. That might seem studiedly leftfield, and the overall mien is indeed thoroughly mental, but actually, it was all the rage at the time, with the hostile guitars and chilly synths of Bowie’s Low, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, and Joy Division’s Closer making Melt but another conjuring of artsy late-70s post-punk experimentalism.
Peter was a good, at times great lyricist, especially when he was dealing with his own or others’ tortured interiority, and so it proves here, with side one of Melt narrating the backstories of an assortment of 24 carat fruitcakes. Martin Scorsese would have a field day with the resulting rogue’s gallery; the panty-sniffing pervert of “Intruder”; the Travis Bickle-like hysteric of “No Self-Control”; the discombobulated catatonic of “I Don’t Remember”; and on the quietly devastating “Family Snapshot”, a budding, fame obsessed, emotionally stunted assassin. Unfortunately, side two is where Pete’s upper-middle-class “social conscience” kicks into gear, with hit-and-miss results: “Games Without Frontiers” is a not-very-engaging reading of war as a schoolyard fancy; “Not One Of Us” is the customary letter-to-the-Guardian take on the evils of groupthink; and “Biko” apparently politicised Bono, which is reason enough to never, ever listen to it again, ever.
Nonetheless, and whisper it, I can kind of see where bien pensant opinion is coming from when Melt is sacrilegiously ranked above So. The former is downright weird, but it has an insidiously magnetic quality; the melodies are initially lost in the blitzkrieg of drums, but they become more apparent and absorbing over time; and side one is structured around the kind of compelling psychodrama that the more conventionally arranged So makes no attempt to replicate. In the end, though, the tunes just aren’t as good; there’s nothing here to rival “Red Rain” or “Mercy Street”, and So’s social commentary is less clumsy, with “Don’t Give Up” and “Big Time” offering subtler, and thus more incisive, indictments of Thatcherism than “Biko’s” white-elites-do-world-music attempt at impugning apartheid. Give me pop or give me death, then, but with that said, I suppose Melt gets a bronze medal.
Rating: * * * *
Standout track: “I Don’t Remember”