Gabriel is a man who has written and recorded many good songs with thoughtful arrangements in his life, but his approach to this material is that of a pompous buffoon who has no understanding of why any of these songs worked in the first place. His bombast is flat, his phrasing is awful, his instincts are poor. He eliminates rhythm and melody from his Talking Heads cover, strips the wit from the Magnetic Fields and the levity from Paul Simon, and performs David Bowie’s “Heroes” in a way that ignores its essential dramatic restraint. There are two modes on this album, and sometimes they intersect: Bloated melodrama and/or clinical depression.
— Matthew Perpetua on Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back. And I have to agree.
