Birdy

by

Peter Gabriel

Edit

This 1985 album is a soundtrack to the 1984 movie entitled 'Birdy' and what a haunting soundtrack! The album cover of the moonlight illuminating the dark room through a window sets the general mood of this album: Dark & Haunting. There are no lyrics anywhere on this soundtrack but there are some tracks that borrow elements from several tracks from the Melting Face & Security LPs. It's really something to listen to the sampled tracks in a totally different setting especially the one where the piano intro of Family Snapshot is sampled on the track Close Up. The Heat is simply The Rhythm Of The Heat as an instrumental. The opening track At Night though is my personal favorite. It's dark, haunting & very gloomy, totally opposite to such tracks as Sledgehammer or Big Time. Fans of SO, US or even of his first two albums might find the Birdy soundtrack to be a bit difficult to immediately enjoy but for die-hard fans or the more adventurous this soundtrack is a must have.

Peter Gabriel's "Birdy" soundtrack is a delicate, quiet, and moody piece. Five of the tracks are recycled-- mixes and/or edits of material from "Peter Gabriel 3" and "Security", and seven of the tracks are brand new.

The material that's recycled is in many cases quite interesting-- the delicate piano line from "Family Snapshot" (titled "Close Up" here) is lovely by itself, and both "Birdy's Flight" (from "Not One of Us") and "The Heat" (from "The Rhythm of the Heat") stand nicely on tehir own.

Of the new tracks, most of them are haunting and of a delicate beauty ("Slow Water", "Dressing the Wound", "Slow Marimbas"). Its really all quite good, pretty stuff.

But I did only give it three stars, and largely for two reasons. First, I don't really feel any emotional content or attachment to this music-- instrumental music, particularly of an ambient or minimalist vein (as much of this is) is often very hard to convey emotion, and I don't think this succeeds in all cases. The power, for me, behind much of Gabriel's music has always been the severely high emotional investment into his pieces he puts. This is quite unlike his more famous soundtrack to "The Last Temptation of Christ", an album titled "Passion". In fact, "Passion" is quite the other reason that I rated this only three stars-- "Passion" is so stunningly good and by the same composer that invariably, I find myself comparing them, and very few soundtracks can hold up to that one.

So perhaps my rating is unfair, but when I want great instrumental music and Peter Gabriel's style, I don't grab this album.