Hit Peter Gabriel Geffen Records, 2003   Reviewed by Tim Keane	It's worth noting that once-upon-a-time underground-artists-turned-household-names don't necessarily sell-out and go middlebrow so much as the middlebrow pays out and comes to them. And just as quickly, the mainstream forgets and the artist carries on. Peter Gabriel is so much a music establishment icon that one can easily overlook just how averse he has been to The Big Time. He infuriated his band mates by abruptly departing from Genesis in 1975 just as the band had begun to break through in the US. Five years later, while Gabriel had returned as a solo artist via the small club circuit and college radio, his third solo venture was flatly rejected as too experimental by Mercury Records. Then, after a run of vast international success in the mid-1980s, he retreated from the spotlight, co-created the world music label Real World and the human rights organization Witness, all the while developing multimedia, interactive and cross-cultural projects, and producing soundtracks that have long since raised the creative bars in the music and the film industries alike (c.f., Birdy 1985, Passion 1989, Ovo 2001 and The Long Walk Home 2002). Having re-emerged after ten years and wrapping up a tour that stretches from Scotland to Bulgaria, Gabriel and his handlers were forced to give away tickets to his recent Wembley gigs while his 2002-2003 U.S. tour had to cancel shows for lack of interest. Now here's Hit/Miss, a retrospective double CD collection that covers his 25 years in and out of the spotlight. Clocking in at over three hours, the collection manages to do more than just cash-in. In large part these disks showcase the risks and the musical cross-breeding in which Gabriel has found his identity and where he has, with his most recent CD Up, re-established himself. What Hit/Miss first reminds us is that unlike, say, Bowie, Gabriel will not need to apologize for the string of hits that made him a household name in the 1980s. Revisit "Games Without Frontiers" with its military whistles and paradiddles and its haunting chorus lifted from the French game show Jeux Sans Frontier, all with a prescience and relevance in its indictment of ethnic and pre-emptive warfare (think Belfast in the 70s, El Salvador in the 80s, Bosnia in the 90s, and, well, the new and "free" Iraq). Even "Shock the Monkey," long misread as an animal-rights ditty, is actually about jealous rage: for all its synth-pop glitz and Moog-grooves the song still conjures primal impulses to violence. Maybe skip the Otis Redding pastiche via The Kick Horns, "Sledgehammer" and plug in to the stormy rhythm sections and piano-driven elegy "Red Rain" which translates unspeakable grief into a complex, chilling, vocal virtuosity still unmatched in rock. Also included is Gabriel's paean to self-transformation, "Solsbury Hill," which magically blends Celtic, folk and classical elements with a punk template. Fugue-like, crescendo-driven tracks from Gabriel's 2002 chart-dropping Up CD round out Hit by and manage to sustain a patient, startling instrumentalism and an expansive if edgy optimism. "Like words together/we can make some sense," he sings in "More Than This." More compelling than Hit is the companion Miss disk. Picking up where his post-apocalyptic lament "Here Comes the Flood," left off, Gabriel offers the aural psychodrama of Carl Jung getting in touch with his inner tribesman for "Rhythm of the Heat" and the manic depressive scherzo of "No Self Control." (Gabriel famously prohibited his session drummers from using cymbals on that breakthrough 1980 album.) Just as inspired is the nightmarish divertimento "I Have the Touch" and the Far Eastern desolation of "A Different Drum." There is the brilliant take on childhood perspectives for "Downside Up," the only live track on the disc, and the sad disconnections between an aging parent and adult child on "Father, Son." The images of the song are part-Siddhartha, part-Wuthering Heights. Even the soothing "Clouds" is a strange hybrid. The song starts out as pure atmosphere, giving way to an Aboriginal choir and didgeridoo, countered by spine-tingling gospel vocals of The Blind Boys of Alabama. Think global call-and-response. Merging dense, studied hi-tech structures with raw emotional vocal harmonies has been Gabriel's hallmark. By now this combination is so often badly mimicked in car commercials and strip malls that we almost forget how much more complex than mere sampling such an approach can be. So when the late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn accompanies Gabriel's dire vocal coloring on "Signal to Noise," the disorienting lyrics and the creepy bridge sections conjure up our intensifying East-West global dissonance. The song's cumulative effect is as unnerving as it is breath-taking. Old school Gabriel-a-philes, if they still care, will have to buy the European import to hear 1978's "DIY," the Robert Fripp-produced three chord classic which summed up in two and half minutes what a generation of British punks could barely articulate, and his elegy to Anne Sexton "Mercy Street" is sadly missing. But new tracks are here too, forecasting a more stripped down approach. "Burn You Up, Burn You Down" manages to do precisely that to the often soupy layers of Gabriel-ambience, as a bluesy Holmes Brothers chorus teams up with nord synthesizers, surba drumming and guitar soloists, played at such a furious tempo that Gabriel's aging baritone has a hard time keeping up; "The Tower That Ate People," about the paranoia of gated communities, displays a gnarled, angry grace, al la Radiohead's Thom Yorke. As musically various as he has been honestly engaged by poetic atmospheres and cultural extremes, Gabriel has built a catalog to outlast the pop-and-fizz that made him a multimillionaire. However theatrical and self-conscious he is on stage, Gabriel's best music conveys its dark ironies with remarkable subtlety. Whether the shivers come from the top of the charts or out of the discount bin, the most worthwhile sounds keep us on our toes by startling us out of our shoes. Those who have been following Gabriel's incarnations these past four decades know that his center has always been in the unexpected: both Hit & Miss invite us back home to those ever-surprising margins. | August 2004   Tim Keane writes fiction and poetry. You can visit him on the Web at www.timkeane.com.	However theatrical and self-conscious he is on stage, Gabriel's best music conveys its dark ironies with remarkable subtlety. Whether the shivers come from the top of the charts or out of the discount bin, the most worthwhile sounds keep us on our toes by startling us out of our shoes.