Peter Gabriel, Long Walk Home

After eight years of relative silence since the fairly blah Us, Peter Gabriel’s finally cranked up the steam and put some music out. Besides the new studio album, Up (due out in a few months) and a set of remastered re-releases of a dozen-odd of his older stuff, Gabriel’s also dipped back into soundtrack work with this, an accompaniment to the Australian film The Rabbit-Proof Fence. Peter Noyce’s movie is the true story of two Aborigine girls who escaped from forced slavery across 1,500 miles of Outback. Gabriel’s soundtrack is a good fit, and not all that surprising given his latterday love of world music. Long Walk has much the same modus operandi as another Gabriel soundtrack—Passion, his score for The Last Temptation of Christ. Its moody synthesizers mingle with sounds indigenous to the film’s setting. In this case, that means aboriginal rhythms, didgeridoo, and samples of Aussie birds and barking dingos. And like Passion, it’s filled with a rumbling melancholy, though it’s a far quieter and unobtrusive piece of music. Like any soundtrack album, Long Walk Home suffers as an independent work from its necessary subordination to the film it serves. Its momentum, its peaks and valleys, are bound to the cadence of visuals we can’t see, rather like overhearing one side of a telephone conversation where the other person is doing most of the talking. The closing track, “Cloudless,” is perhaps the only one that stands on its own, soaring over a bed of electronic percussion on the winged voices of the Blind Boys of Alabama.