Album: Peter Gabriel

Long Walk Home, Realworld

A stop-gap of sorts before his next "proper" album, this is Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to the Phillip Noyce film Rabbit-Proof Fence, about the escape of three Aboriginal children from an institution intended to indoctrinate them into the ways of white society. Titles like "Crossing the Salt Pan", "Running to the Rain" and "A Sense of Home" indicate the sonic territory covered, though there's less variety between the various tracks than might be intended, most featuring some combination of drums'n'drones, overlaid here and there with warily foreboding strings. The effect is undeniably cinematic: "Running to the Rain" looms slowly into view like the sun rising over the horizon, while the distant keyboard drones of "Tracker" evoke a palpable sense of history, as if recalling something dark and ancient. As you'd expect from the foremost patron of world music, this features an international cast playing a vast array of instruments, from hammer dulcimer and didgeridoo (of course) to all manner of pan-cultural percussive timbres. Such vocals as appear – including a couple of contributions from the Blind Boys of Alabama, and just one from Gabriel himself – are wordless hummings which slip smoothly into the backdrops, human presences just as attuned to their surroundings as the native children are to theirs.