Genesis - The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway

The Lamb Dies on Broadway (1974):  A two-disc rock opera that seems to drag on for hours, this one's analogous to Pink Floyd's The Wall in that there's a solid, perhaps even great, single album overextended into double LP length.  Paradoxically for Genesis' lengthiest platter yet, the song lengths aren't up but shortened into manageable 4 to 5 minute pop songs, for the most part – only two songs stretch out for a mere 8 minutes!  In fact, practically the entire first disc is entertaining all the way through, without any truly wretched songs and only a few rough spots – collectively, the finest single disc of music collected on a Genesis album yet.  The second disc suffers a running order that sets pop songs next to ugly instrumental experimental tracks that go nowhere and are sometimes as acutely painful to listen to as a Cabaret Voltaire found-sound piece ("The Waiting Room").  This also marks a major shift in the band's musical direction:  as the "plot" (hint: there is none) of this alleged showbiz musical revolves around a teenage Puerto Rican gang member in the Big Crapple, Genesis abandon the eccentric village green Englishness of their previous five records entirely.  The band sounds harder, tighter, more direct, and more 'Americanized'; in short, like a totally different band.  They're able to rock out convincingly for the first time ("Back in NYC", "It"), and even manage to come up with at least one wonderful, bouncy pop tune, "Counting Out Time," in which our hero flubs his first date with a real live girl because he learnt all his moves with women from reading pornography.   Have I mentioned yet how a certain theme of bourgeois Anglo-Saxon repressed sexuality runs throughout some of Gabriel's early lyrics?  "The Lamia" tells the tale of the protagonist's flesh being devoured by nymphs in a bizarrely Dionysian orgy, which informs me way too much about Peter Gabriel's sexual fantasies for comfort – just close your eyes to the lyrics and concentrate on the gorgeous melody.  Actually, "The Lamia" may be the strongest song on the album; it introduces a creepy goth element that adds extra potency to the already intriguing Genesis brew.  If you want to try to attempt to discern a plot to this lyrically incoherent mish-mash of acid-drenched nightmare imagery, Disc One takes place aboveground in the daylight, while Disc Two feels like Rael has delved underground the New York sewers at night, with a weird, creepily gothic atmosphere to the proceedings, Banks' organs following what feel like almost medieval chord changes.  In sum, despite the inconsistencies one should expect from a sprawling double album, there's enough good to great material to make it the band's best, and the one I reach for on the shelf when I'm in the mood for Genesis.  ****

Genesis - Selling England by the Pound

Selling England by the Pound (1973) – It gets off on an unpromising start, with Gabriel singing a capella (and here it bears quoting the lyrics verbatim):




"Can you tell me where my country lies?" said the unifaun to his true love's eyes.



That's not the way to start a record! And what the hell is a unifaun? Is that some sort of "clever" play on unicorn? But initial impressions can be misleading, and "Dancing With the Moonlit Knight" turns out to be perhaps the best Genesis song ever. The lyrics, while still not making much literal sense, keep improving as the song goes on, with some of Gabriel's finest, most unaffected singing as the band behind him slowly builds up until it reaches a swift keyboard crescendo towards the end. It's a compressed "Supper's Ready" in eight minutes, with only three or four separate tunes stitched together, and this time much more seamlessly than the rather clumsy transitions that plagued most of Foxtrot. The band's increased professionalism makes this a much smoother ride than before, but the flipside of smooth and professional = increased boredom. The second song, "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" is the band's first attempt at the type of bent new-wavish pop that Peter Gabriel would pursue during his early solo career, but it's just not very good. It's got a hook....somewhere....but the chorus is kind of stupid and it's simply not that catchy or interesting. Much better are the extended prog epics, "Firth of Fifth" and "The Cinema Show". The latter concerns itself with the weighty subject of a couple going out on a date, with Gabriel taking both the male and female points of view, until near the middle he adopts the persona of Tiresias, the creature from Greek mythology who existed at points as both a man and a woman. It's as pretentious as it sounds, and if you can't handle pretentiousness, then you really have no business listening to Genesis records. Go pogo to the Ramones instead. All in all, the playing and songwriting are noticeably improved since the last album, but it wouldn't be a Genesis album without some noticeable low points. "The Battle of Epping Forest" is a supposedly humorous mock-epic involving East End gang fights, with Gabriel obnoxiously adopting his patentedly annoying 'playing different characters in a play' vocal affectations. I don't know jack about the British class system and neither do I wish to know, but a posh public school boy affecting a gruff Cockney accent comes across as condescending not to mention silly. An easily overlooked novelty tune, though? Not when it runs on to bloody near twelve minutes. More easily overlookable since it's so dull and lifeless and therefore easy to sleep through is the Phil Collins vocal spotlight, "More Fool Me", a three minute soft rock tune. Some incredulously note this tune as a highlight, saying that it's a pointer towards the type of pop records that Genesis and Collins would make in the '80s, and I have to ask, when is that a good thing? It's not even "Against All Odds" good, it's the type of bland second-rate balladry that would take up space hidden away as track 3 on side 2 of a mid-'80s Phil Collins solo album – totally forgettable, hookless and gormless.



Fans often rate this as the best Genesis album, but I don't really see it. Sure, it's the smoothest and most professional and least embarrassing of the early Genesis albums, but it also has one pretty sizable flaw in comparison to the other early Genesis albums – it's also the most boring. That may sound contradictory, that this at the same time contains some of Genesis' best and yet most boring music (sometimes the categories overlapping). It's got a low-energy, leisurely pace to it (the average song length coming to around ten minutes to make its point) and instrumental mix sounds muted and soft in comparison to the garish thumpings of Foxtrot or Nursery Cryme. This makes it initially difficult to get into – don't make this your first entry in the garden hedges of Genesis-land – but eventually repeated listenings slowly reveal its merits. ***1/2

Genesis - Foxtrot

Foxtrot (1972) – Since there are only 6 tracks on the CD, I'll review this one track by track.



1) Watcher of the Skies – Rockets matters off on a leaden start, an attempted sci-fi anthem about god looking down upon his creatures that haven't taken care of the planet properly, with one of the ugliest mellotron tones (I'm assuming that's the instrument Banks is using) I've encountered. It chugs on energetically for over seven minutes while steadfastly refusing to embrace catchiness or melodicism.



2) Time Table – A simple, pretty piano ballad that is easily the most accessible and immediately enjoyable tune. As long as you can handle lyrics about jousting knights, and kings and queens sipping wine from goblets gold, this is a wonderful slice of melodic pop. Perhaps its simplicity in face of the maddeningly complex compositions that surround it make it so refreshing – doing simple well is often a difficult task to accomplish; any fool can master hypercomplexity. And despite the affected lyrics, Gabriel does manage one insightful couplet: "Why, why do we suffer each race to believe / That no race has been grander?"



3) Get'Em Out By Friday – Another science fiction tune, about rent control in a futuristic society plagued by overpopulation. Glancing at the lyric sheet, I note that Gabriel is supposedly singing this song theatrically in different parts from six different characters. You can tell because he changes his vocal affectations throughout, from lyric to lyric. The effect is more annoying than anything else, as is the band constantly shifting time signatures and keys to change the mood to fit the different characters' sections. The eight and a half minutes given aren't enough time to flesh this all out in any other manner than clumsily.



4) Can Utility and the Coastliners – i.e., the tune that passes everybody by without being too memorable. It's got some fast keyboard parts as it speeds up towards the end.



5) Horizons – Steve Hackett guitar solo. It's only a minute and a half long and is prettily played.



6) Supper's Ready – All the other songs on this album seem to be mere appetizers for this 23 minute long behemoth. It's not one long jam that stretches on forever like "Sister Ray" or merely a collection of guitar/bass/drum/keyboard solos stitched together; like I said, Genesis were always very song-like, and this is nothing less than 15 separate songs mashed together into one Abbey Road-esque suite (I think; I long since lost count of exactly how many tunes by the seven minute mark). It's an exhausting listen, but it manages to hold my interest with its ever-shifting moods and textures to the very end. I have no idea what it's "about", if anything much at all, and I doubt the band did, either. A prog-rock landmark, even if it's the type of thing I'm only in the mood for listening to once a year or so.



I'm awarding this one ***, even if I only really like two songs. But it helps that one of those two songs takes up half the record.

Genesis - Band Introduction

The career trajectory from innovative art rockers to pop sellouts has led many to overrate the first half of Genesis' career and underrate the second half. The six studio albums the band recorded in the first half of the '70s with Peter Gabriel declaiming lead vocals behind giant masks of fruit bowls over his head (though they'd like you to ignore the debut they recorded when they were still bugger-happy public schoolboys) had their moments and even some songs that were good from start to finish, but the overall impression is that of a talented band struggling to work out its kinks. Gabriel's endlessly inventive imagination and the band's constant sense of experimentation always kept the band at the very least interesting even when they were boring, but also more inconsistent than warranted. The recurrent problem of classic progressive rock is that its reach too often exceeded its grasp, which can be thrilling when it succeeds, but when it fails you wind up with ELP albums. Early Genesis differed from most other prog-rockers in eschewing, for the most part, lengthy solo showcases and orchestrated attempts at classical/pop fusion; to their credit, they based their music on songs and tunes. Theirs was a highly idiosyncratic, ur-English style that conjured up images of Alice in Wonderland playing cricket on the green in front of a Victorian mansion; the Kinks of the Village Green Preservation Society heavily, heavily on acid led by a Pied Piper Syd Barrett. In 1975, Peter Gabriel left, and for a while the band continued on in a prog direction, but with keyboardist Tony Banks by now completely dominating the band, drowning out all the other players with his overbearing synths – the analogy here is no longer the whimsical side of early Pink Floyd, but with Who's Next with the guitar parts removed from the master tapes, leading guitarist Steve Hackett to quit in frustration because he couldn't hear himself play. Then, as we all know, Genesis entered the '80s, and Phil Collins, Jehovah help us, took the spotlight, for music that was no longer analogous with Pink Floyd, the Who, or the Kinks, but with a post-menopausal, MOR Beatles. And then Phil left in '90s, nobody bought the CD they recorded with only two original members left, and then they split, mercifully.

I'm only reviewing the CDs that I actually have in my possession, though as you can tell from the above I've heard at one time or the other several of the rest. If you do need a good dose of '80s pop, the 1983 album simply entitled "Genesis" with the children's blocks on the cover, is actually very good – much better than "Illegal Alien" suggests, that's the worst song on that record.