Disappointment in Aboriginal oddity

Long Walk Home: Music from "Rabit-Proof Fence"
Peter Gabriel
EMI / Real World Records Prog rock veteran and experienced experimenter, Peter Gabriel is back with a new album, Long Walk Home: Music from Rabbit-Proof Fence, a soundtrack to the Australian film The "Rabbit-Proof Fence." The liner notes read, 'Rabbit-Proof Fence' is the true story of Molly Craig, one of Australia\'s 'Stolen Generation.' Molly…and her sister and cousin had been taken fifteen hundred miles from their home and family to one of the government institutions that had been established to train Aboriginal children as domestic workers for white society. Molly led the girls in an escape. Pursued by trackers, they succeeded in finding the rabbit-proof fence that Molly knew would lead them all the way across Australia's outback to their home." The album is full of prog rock synthesizers and of course, the world music for which Gabriel's Real World Records is famous. This album seems to be far more passionate and tribal in composition than previous Gabriel albums, like So. At the beginning of my listening, the long drawn-out tones, the airiness and space juxtaposed against sounds of confrontation and chaos foreshadow the obvious. Long Walk Home is more of a soundtrack than an album. This means that this is not a new Peter Gabriel album. This is a film score created with a kind of natural ambience like a mixture of Brian Eno, Aphex Twin and traditional Aboriginal music. With this soundtrack one can feel the hopes, hopelessness, anger and exhaustion of the characters in the movie, which is very impressive. This soundtrack is a great piece of art in the context of a movie, but as an album this is boring. This is the soundtrack of a movie about three kids walking fifteen hundred miles to return home, and by the end of the soundtrack I feel exhausted -- like I have walked fifteen hundred miles. After all of that, Gabriel only sings on three tracks, and it's the same melody line on all three of those tracks. Once a king of college music, Peter Gabriel has most definitely fallen to the lowly level of receiving a bad review from a college newspaper -- a king has fallen.