On his new i/o tour, Peter Gabriel delivers a masterful meditation on time and space. Part concert, part performance art, the three-hour show is stunning.
Quite famously, Peter Gabriel has been the English eccentric whose early work embraced the most dramatic corners of progressive rock, whose esoteric later music toyed with the hypnotic drift of ambient electronics and global polyrhythms and whose middle period touched on glossy new-wave soul and hammering pulses. Lyrically, this same mannered sand-and-silty vocalist has led with rumination and introspection accompanied by deep, erudite looks into the subconscious, the struggle of human relationships and our fraught interaction with the planet(s) across 4.5 billion years. In other words, Peter Gabriel likes a good long conversation with his audience. Or, as he put it on “Big Time”: “I've been stretching my mouth to let those big words come right out.”