Peter Gabriel 3: Melt

The third solo album from Peter Gabriel balances the playful and the dark with a God Mode handle on tone. Placing strict rules on the drummers (ex-Genesis bandmate Phil Collins and Jerry Marotta) to abandon cymbals gives the album a phenomenal sense of gooey depth, as “No Self Control” putters along with Reich-ian marimba, “I Don’t Remember” and “Not One Of Us” crack through the goo with post-punk fury and paranoia, and the villains of “Intruder” and “Family Snapshot” lurch and crawl across the walls of gated drums and sweeping orchestrations. The epic finale “Biko” remains one of the great anti-apartheid songs to come from outside of South Africa, with the calls for greater revolutionary action going from a whisper to a holler over hypnotic drums and organ. A wonderfully haunting success all around.