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There’s also a precision to these songs, and their relative simplicity in comparison to his more experimental music gives each instrument space to breathe.Įven his own voice is elevated, floating alongside Doonan’s and occasionally forging ahead on its own. “I just love her voice.” The trio – Doonan, Ali Friend on bass, and Daisy Palmer on drums – have grounded his compositions and give a rich texture witness Palmer propelling ‘Feel The Land’ to a crescendo, or adding to the jittery bustle of ‘Above The Waves Of Crystal Waters’.
Peter gabriel in your eyes string quartet full#
“It’s less to do with me and more to do with Rosie,” says Metcalfe of the decision to continue with a full band set up on Absence. And it’s the latter that’s often the stand out element, conveying a regal grace, poise, and hope. It sets the tone beautifully, Metcalfe’s viola a soft hum underneath Doonan’s ghostly voice. “We have / so much / my love”, sings Rosie Doonan on elegiac opener ‘She Feels’, a gentle hymn about reminiscence and a life shared. “The imagined conversations you’ll have when someone is in the final, physical stages of death, the electricity leaving our body, and the final thoughts of both the person about to die and the person who has to carry on with life.”īut Metcalfe’s triumph is to steer Absence away from the mawkish and trite, writing instead from a warm, loving perspective. “It’s about the conversations they have,” he explains. The record is chronological, exploring the relationship between two lovers, one of whom is dying. Written around the time of his last record, 2015’s The Appearance Of Colour, it found its way into his setlists and inspired a new suite of songs exploring not death itself, but the absence left by loved ones and how we remember them. “I just wrote some words, and that was the start of it.” Over delicate, spectral piano, Metcalfe’s voice sounds disconsolate, shot through with sadness. “I wasn’t thinking of it to be cathartic,” he says of ‘Flood, Tide’.
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Some months later, Metcalfe sat down to process his thoughts. “There’s always been tracks influenced by the death of my father,” he says, although Absence was born in the aftermath of a very different tragedy a friend’s sudden, unexpected suicide. But it’s also his most affecting, deconstructing a subject he’s been interested in since his childhood in New Zealand. Absence, the fifth record to bear his own name, is something of a departure for Metcalfe, framing bold images and themes with some of the most conventional song structures he’s ever employed.
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His finely tuned compositions are neat yet grand in scale, both in terms of sound and the conceptual ideas underpinning them. As a solo artist, Metcalfe explores electro-classical soundscapes and the boundaries between genres.