Genesis
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The best and most frustrating progressive rock band. Best because they were masters at their instruments. Frustrating because you have to jump through so many hoops. Phil Collins was secretly a force of nature on the kit; secretly, because the production on their early albums stifled him to such a degree that you had to physically squint to hear him. Peter Gabriel was, of course, one of the most invested and funniest singers in rock history but he was gone way too soon. Steve Hackett was a brilliant guitar player, but creatively stifled after Gabriel left and turned into a glorified session player. Tony Banks might be the best pianist in prog, but he also loved dorky keyboard tones: of all the different keyboards he could have chosen, why that fairy sounding one for the heavy “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men,” I’ll never know. And sure, Mike Rutherford never got as groovy as Chris Squire from Yes, but I never wanted his bass to be funky anyway, and he roared like John Entwistle on those early records.
Most of all frustrating because their discography only really starts for me when Hackett and Collins join the band on their third album and effectively ends for me with Gabriel’s departure after their sixth: so I get four albums out of 15, a pretty measly fraction.
What differentiated Genesis from other progressive rock bands at that time was that they were great at compact pop songwriting as much as showing off their technical chops even during the Gabriel-era. Selling England by the Pound has a strange little number called “I Know What I Like” that yielded them a minor hit on the UK Singles Chart; the majority of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway are effectively pop songs, and is the piano rock bounce of “Harold the Barrel” not basically an Elton John song with better lyrics than Bennie Taupin could write? Even their longer, ambitious songs don’t feel like a sprawl or jam like so much other prog.
So on face value, it would make sense for me to like their pop period, but I don’t. Unlike Fleetwood Mac who transformed themselves so fully from its original iteration for the better, following the back-to-back exits of Gabriel and Hackett, the three remaining members of Genesis flailed about looking for a clear direction until they wrote a clean hit song with “Follow You Follow Me.” But the trio decided not to approach pop music on its own terms, but rather to keep doing it from a prog rock lens, hence the half-baked concept of Duke, or the two-part suites on Genesis and Invisible Touch, or droning instrumental sections: they constantly felt the need to appease any leftover fans while also catering to their expanding audience in a way that’s not fulfilling for either.
What also bothers me about their transition is that they lost the pastoral sound that no one else did as good as them. The first part of “Supper’s Ready” proves they could have been a great folk rock band if they wanted to be, but it’s not just the obvious acoustic-based moments like those: even when Hackett and Banks are playing electric instruments, they produced a warm-winter atmosphere reminiscent of the bucolic, slower movements of romantic symphonies as envisioned by a modern rock band. Such that even though they never bothered to cover Bach or Brahms as did Egg or Yes, or incorporated chamber instruments like King Crimson, I get way more reverence of classical music from Genesis’ music than their contemporaries. And thanks to Hackett and Collins, when they wanted to rock, they could rock loud, hard, and fast too.
Here’s the guide:
Don’t compare From Genesis to Revelation to King Crimson’s debut from that same year because it doesn’t even stack up to Yes’ debut. That Yes album is charmingly amateurish at times, but you can still hear the instrumental talents of Chris Squire and Bill Bruford: this was clearly the same band that would make their later masterpieces. By contrast, listening to From Genesis to Revelation, you’d have no idea this would be the same band that would give us Foxtrot in a few years’ time. Part of the reason is that Steve Hackett and Phil Collins aren’t here, with Gabriel, Rutherford, and Banks playing with guitarist Anthony Phillips and drummer John Silver, all of whom went to Charterhouse School in Surrey. But Peter Gabriel isn’t taking chances with his voice, while Tony Banks plays it safe throughout. Not helping is that the songs are just 3-minute pop/rock cuts with vaguely-inspired blues chords that sound a little tacky and uninspired in ‘69 whereas it might’ve cut it in 1963. Too many songs; too many of the same chord progressions. The album was buried: Decca noted that there already existed an American band with the same name, but producer Jonathan King refused to change the band name, so the solution was to release the album with a minimal cover with no name on it; at the same time, some record stores filed the album under their religious section.
The band gets more ambitious on Trespass but don’t have the technical skills to pull off said ambitions. John Mayhew is here, replacing John Silver, and he’s not good at all (though the single art of “The Knife” is a photograph of the band with Hackett and Collins; just a big “fuck you” to Phillips and Mayhew). Tony Banks takes it upon himself to step up, but the organ tones on “Looking for Someone” and “White Mountain” are altogether flabby. That being said, “The Knife” is their first good song, one of many battle charges to come from this band, made clear even before Peter Gabriel starts playing the role of some war commander as Tony Banks’ fuzzy organ thrusts forwards backed by those drums. And Gabriel gets really into it, shouting “Get ready to fight for your freedom, NOW!”, or switching to a more sinister whisper, “Some of you are going to die,” sounding like he’s going to shoot some low-ranking maggot to prove his point. That being said, “The Knife” isn’t perfect: the choruses are just awkwardly arrived at, and I would bet good money that Tony Banks did most of the lyric writing with their insufferable proto-“Firth of Fifth” seriousness (“Martyrs of course to the freedom that I shall provide”). Give this song to this band circa 1973 with a producer that doesn’t render the quiet parts totally inert and at the same time brings out the pastoral quality that the band was going for, and you’d have their first flat-out masterpiece.
Anthony Phillips quit, not liking the tour life, and so the band replaced him with Mick Barnard, who was not up snuff, so the band put out an advertisement for a new guitarist. They found one in Steve Hackett, and with Phil Collins replacing John Mayhew, Nursery Cryme is the de facto start of Genesis’ golden era. It’s a good album, but not a great one because a lot of it feels like a rehearsal for their new two albums. The chord progressions on “The Musical Box” and “The Fountain of Salmacis” sounds like they’re testing the waters for “Firth of Fifth,” and the former plays like a dry-run for “Supper’s Ready”; “For Absent Friends”—Phil Collins’ first lead vocal spot—feels like a miniature version of “More Fool Me”; “Harlequin” fills the same role as does “Horizons.” My recommendation? Take this as a pastoral experience that happens to occasionally sport a bad-ass groove or solo, such as Hackett and Banks working off each other in a way that Phillips never did on “The Musical Box,” or the proto-metal introduction of “The Return of The Giant Hogweed,” or Hackett’s solo on the same song, putting in so much physical weight into individual notes. And I love the absurd and frantic rush of “Harold the Barrel” as Peter Gabriel pretends to be different onlookers watching someone about to jump off a window ledge.
The first few years of the early-70s must have been exciting to see all of these prog bands get more and more ambitious while trying to out-do each other with longer and longer and more technical compositions: Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick,” Yes’ “Close to the Edge” and Genesis’ “Supper’s Ready” all arrived around the same time, and each of these cases felt like a leap compared to what the band was previously up to. Ask any non-fictional Genesis fan what the best Genesis song is, and the unanimous consensus would “Supper’s Ready,” the 23-minute epic that closes Foxtrot that’s twice as long as their last-longest song. A minor pox: there needed to be a comedown after “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men,” but “How Dare I Be So Beautiful” doesn’t give anything resembling a tune or even a texture (piano chords treated like a organ, yawn). But otherwise, every section contributes to the feeling that you’re listening to peak of prog.
“The Lover’s Leap” is already captivating in its three guitar harmonies (from Tony Banks, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford) as Peter Gabriel describes a normal night suddenly turn into a nightmare: “Walking across the sitting-room, I turn the television off / Sitting beside you, I look into your eyes / As the sound of motor cars fades in the night” is how the song begins and soon, he introduces “Six saintly shrouded men move across the lawn slowly.” In between these two parts, he sings two lines that could be prog rock’s great love couplet: “And it’s hello babe, with your guardian eyes so blue-ooh / Hey my bay-by, don’t you know our love is true,” and well, I can’t imagine any other artist during this time taking the chance Peter Gabriel does to sing “blue” or “baby” in that manner.
The song gets crazy afterwards. Note the ghost child’s wail (“Look, look into my mouth, he cries”), a genuinely horrifying texture in Genesis’ discography—so no surprise that Gabriel went into psychological horror mode on his 1980-1982 albums, which are his best solo albums—or Peter Gabriel looking at the chaos and deciding “Something tells me I’d better activate my prayer capsule!” Collins never sounded so vital in his military gallop for “Ikhnaton and Itsacon,” while Hackett’s solo is reminiscent of John Coltrane by way of the Byrds: notes splintering off and exploding in a marvelous display across the sky. Collins took it easy on the introduction—sticking to the triangle like a kindergartener—so when the band returns to “Lover’s Leap” with Collins on the full kit, the recapitulation feels like a genuine release and not merely some reprise. And that’s to say nothing of the way Gabriel sings, “There’s Winston Churchill, dressed in drag / He used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag!” When Peter Gabriel left, the band lost the humour that made them exceptional — a quality that slowly disappeared from rock music at large after prog rock’s decline.
There are two truths about this album which is that (1) every other song here is good, and yet, (2) combined, they still pale in comparison to “Supper’s Ready.” I even adore Hackett’s baroque-inspired “Horizons” as the perfect aperitif before the epic closer, and wish that Genesis, Jefferson Airplane, and Led Zeppelin all made more of these little instrumentals which are secret highlights on their respective albums. Opener “Watcher of the Skies” feels like an earnest take on sci-fi to “Supper’s Ready”’s fantasy; Tony Banks’ mellotron sets the scene, and I’m glad they switched producers because Bob Potter—the original producer to work on the album—wanted to cut the intro. Elsewhere, Gabriel outdoes himself on “Get ‘em out by Friday,” presenting a one-man, three-character play by himself, about businessmen increasing the price of rent until the tenants can’t afford to live there anymore to the point that by 2012, they start imposing a “humanoid height” restriction so they “can fit twice as many in the same building.” (The reality of the housing crisis in Toronto in 2024 is not that far off.)
There is no song on Selling England by the Pound that’s even close to “Supper’s Ready,” and that’d still be true if they kept to the original intent of having “Dancing With the Moonlit Knight” and “The Cinema Show” as one big piece (hence why the album ends with a reprise of “Moonlit Knight” after “The Cinema Show”). But the overall song quality is better, and not only that, but it’s the best-sounding Genesis album ever: on any previous Genesis album, Collins’ little drum hits under the chorus lead-in to “I Know What I Like” (“Keep them moving sharp!”) would have sounded feeble, but there’s actual heft to his hits this time, without being as in your face as they would be on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or A Trick of the Tail. The only weak parts are the lyrics of “Firth of Fifth,” written by Tony Banks—truly heinous stuff, even though Gabriel does what he can with the material—and the entirety of “More Fool Me,” a pretty ignorable waft that’s led on vocals by Collins that could have been cut entirely without hurting the album, and I wish “Dancing With the Moonlit Knight” and “The Battle of Epping Forest” got into the actual song bits much faster.
“I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)” is the best song ever about lawnmowing, and the hand percussion from Peter Gabriel adds a warm layer of psychedelia — like air bubbles popping on the water’s surface. Tony Banks’ introduction of “Firth of Fifth” is the best thing he’s ever done, and the instrumental section is one for the history books, starting with a mischievous little flute solo from Gabriel, followed by Banks revisiting the introduction on synths that—fucking finally!—sound grand instead of cheap, and then Steve Hackett with one of his best-ever guitar solos, incorporating the melody that Gabriel had stated earlier. The second side gets far more atmospheric, with Hackett, Banks, and even Collins’ notes sometimes rippling like small waves. Banks and Gabriel weren’t happy with “After the Ordeal”—originally written by Hackett and later on edited with Banks and Rutherford—which looks ahead to the band dismissing Hackett’s “Inside and Out” from Wind & Wuthering later on, prompting his own exit from Genesis.
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway sees progressive rock returning to its psychedelic roots by making one of the most fascinating psychological thrillers in music history, presenting a dirty-realistic version of the NYC underbelly while also being a fantastical trip. No record I know sounds like this one, darker and songier than Genesis’ other prog albums while retaining the humour and whimsy. That is the short version of why this record is worthy. It is also an incredibly frustrating record because (1) the story is impossible to follow, and this is coming from someone that once mapped out all the lyrics and read what everyone on songmeanings had to say about them, and (2) the second disc is perhaps the most substantial drop-off of any double disc album that I can think of.
Interestingly, they’re writing actual songs here, so Lamb should theoretically go down easier for the Patrick Bateman sort who backtracked here from their pop records. Tony Banks’ piano intro of the title track, liberally pulling from Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10 in E” and the aqueous tones of “Cuckoo Cocoon,” functioning like a superb piece of proto-dream pop are just incredible, while “Counting Out Time” is, oh my fucking God, just a huge laugh, about the main character learning how to please a woman from a book. I get so much out of Gabriel singing “Erogenous zones, I love you / Without you, what would a poor boy do?” before a hard rock guitar hook is deployed — something that would be beneath Genesis otherwise but is used here for maximum sleaze. In any other song, that guitar would sound so stupid but here, it just adds to the humour. All of these are songs — short and actual songs. There are two long ones on the first disc, and both are highlights. “In the Cage” blasts through in its 8-minute run-time, and you’ll remember Gabriel singing the title words fondly, which is backed up by additional effects from none other than Brian Eno. That’s one of two songs featuring some work from Brian Eno shortly after his departure from Roxy Music. (In exchange for helping out, Eno would grab Collins to help for his own albums.) Elsewhere, the synths pummel about on “Back in N.Y.C,” inspiring Gabriel to do some of his angriest singing ever, “AHHHHHHHHHHHYou say I must be crazy!” (Key line: “As I cuddled the porcupine, he said I have no one to blame but me.”)
The second disc gets pretty tuneless in stretches, with songs that seem to exist to either stretch the album out (“Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats”), exposition dumps (“In the Rapids”), and thankful reprises (“The Light Lies Down on Broadway”). My main question is this: why does “It” have these cheesy synths bounding up and up, which seems particularly unearned on the closer for an album like this? (Put it this way: if “Follow Me Follow You” ended this album instead, it wouldn’t sound as out of place as you’d think.)
A Trick of the Tail is one of Genesis’ best albums… by default. Peter Gabriel is out now, citing disillusionment with the music industry (naturally, he would return just three years later with his debut solo album). After numerous auditions for a replacement, Phil Collins takes over lead vocals, but the issue is that, like New Order’s Bernard Sumner channeling Ian Curtis on Movement, Phil Collins is trying too hard to sound exactly like Peter Gabriel, going so far as to mimic Gabriel’s device of pretending to play different people on “Robbery, Assault and Battery,” where it just highlights how Gabriel tried to actually become these fictional people whereas Collins sounds like he’s reading off a sheet. Put another way: Gabriel is one of rock’s great singers, Collins never was. Too timid on these early records, and then suddenly way too confident afterwards. And two other big issues: (1) Steve Hackett’s role is severely diminished here, and it already feels like …And Then There Were Three… and (2) Phil Collins’ drums have started to get overbearing in the mix from this point-onwards. If there were ever an album that put too much emphasis on how good a drummer was, it’s this one — or a Led Zeppelin album.
Progressive rock crawled up its own ass in the mid-70s, exemplified by records like Wind & Wuthering. Forget “Your Own Special Way” and" “Afterglow,” both predicting the AOR shit the band would churn out near the end, the instrumental tracks are the real nadir. Not only do they have that air of filler about them, they also have a pretention, like, ‘we thumb our noses at pop/rock so much we can’t even be assed to write songs anymore.’ Do these instrumental songs sound good? Are the people playing them technically proficient with their instruments? Yes and yes, but also: that’s the bare fucking minimum — you can get ‘good sound’ and ‘technically proficient’ anywhere. In contrast to A Trick of the Tail, there’s a rank confusion permeating throughout this album and ten-elevenths of the barely-better next one. And that’s notable as soon as the album starts: Tony Banks leads “Eleventh Earl of Mar” off with a weird, elephant wail of a synth riff and it just awkwardly transitions into this hellishly boring song. Steve Hackett is barely on this: it feels like he’s an honoured guest on just one or two songs instead of a full-time member, and so it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that he packed up his ball and left immediately afterwards. Probably for the better in a weird way because the band might never have landed on pop if he were still there.
Off the strength of “Follow You Follow Me,” …And Then There Were Three… went platinum, and I wonder how many people bought it managed to make it all the way to the end for that payload, with only the whistled synth tones of “Deep in the Motherlode” to keep them company. Nothing on this album sounds like “Follow You Follow Me,” which is the band’s best song during these awkward transition years between prog and full pop. Personally, I can’t even make it through opener “Down and Out”: it’s just heartbreaking hearing Phil Collins do these stupid drum parts in a supposedly virtuosic display and/or ‘look something is happening’ but ends up blustering yet boring. I don’t think it’s commendable that this band sounds like 1983 as early as 1978, quite the fucking opposite in fact, and everything has that oddly synthetic, inhuman sound. Though they lost 40% of their members, they lost about 80% of the talent somehow.
As if wary of losing what original fans of theirs who stayed with them through those transitional records before they found pop, they bury the lede: Duke is a pop album disguised as a prog rock album replete with a half-baked concept. Some songs are dressed up with long instrumental sections so it seems like we’re still listening to the Genesis of the early-70s, but not only are these instrumental sections hopelessly plodding, repetitive, and frankly stupid, they also diminish what little pop value there is in the actual song portions too. “Misunderstood” is the best song here, but it is emblematic of all of Genesis’ hits from now on going forward: surface-level pleasures, and once I hear that chorus with Collins harmonizing with the synth and that doofy, wispy backing vocal that follows, I’ve heard everything that the song has to offer. Other hit “Turn It On Again” is worse, a dime-a-dozen 80s’ synth pop chord progression. I love the album cover, bringing to mind that some of the Gabriel-era material was basically (fantastical) children’s stories, and this is one of the first-ever Genesis albums I’ve ever heard.
Abacab gets my vote for their most underrated album. It’s the only record of their pop era where all three musicians are working with The Groove or The Song in mind, and yet for some reason the pop crowd seems to skirt over this one. Collins is less overbearing here than he’ll ever be again, and there feels like fewer long Banks solos. It’s ultimately just 9 songs that are designed to get your ass shaking as much as these three former nerds can muster. The title track feels beamed in by a completely different band, and while I don’t ever listen to the full 7 minutes, I do find the first minute or so very exhilarating. The call-and-response between squelchy guitar and clean keyboards over the throb and pulse of the simple synth line; the momentous chord change as it enters the chorus. “No Reply At All” is simpler but still charming, and thank God for bringing in the Earth, Wind & Fire horn section to punch things up: without them, this would be dangerously close to any other pop song from 1981. And while the album doesn’t keep up afterwards—“Dodo / Lurker” gets particularly embarrassing as always when Collins attempts to sing about something remotely whimsical like Gabriel did; the final three songs are a complete write-off—it never gets as bad or boring as the albums that flank it.
Before Genesis, the trio always came to the studio without any pre-written material so they all worked together as a democratic band. Drop the needle on this record and you’re greeted with what sounds very much like a Phil Collins’ solo track. The drum mix is dense and claustrophobic, reminiscent of Phil Collins’ contributions on Peter Gabriel’s ‘Melt’, and Collins gets really into a song that’s allegedly about a man visiting a prostitute who bears physical resemblance to his own mom. (What is it with these prog rock bands and their Oedipal complexes?) And even though the drums mix feels full from the onset, it builds towards the release of the kick drum 4 minutes in. The album follows up with “That’s All,” which does what many Genesis songs fail to bother with, which is groove. In its modest, extremely white way, sure, but I think of Tony Banks’ piano line fondly. The rest of the album is not good. Phil Collins has a huge tendency to overdo it, and so when he tries to empathize with how it feels to be an “Illegal Alien,” he goes at it with the fakest, whitest Jamaican accent you’ve ever heard—no accent you can sell me, huh—and what is supposed to be a song that empathizes with immigrants ends up sounding like one that makes fun of them. (Not helping is that the song’s most potent lines are omitted from the single version, “But I’ve got a sister who’d be willing to oblige / She will do anything now to help me get to the outside.”) The entire second side barely gives you the benefit of a tune, let alone a half-interesting drum mix or groove. I found this album for $4 in a bargain vinyl bin and even then I feel like I wasted my money.
Invisible Touch is an undisputed masterpiece in some sociopathic circles but in reality, it’s their worst album at this point, so it’s fitting that it was released in 1986 to coincide with the worst albums of the older rock legends. The 11-minute “Domino” and 5-minute closing instrumental “The Brazilian” are what I alluded to earlier where this trio wants it both ways: they want to make tons of money (this album outsold Peter Gabriel’s So from the same year even though that’s the far better record) but they also want to prove that they were once a band that—how did they put it? Ah, yes—was once “determined to drive beyond existing stagnant music forms.” The first half of “Domino” flat-out sucks, with that supposedly exotic but gross-sounding flute texture giving way to even worse sounding keyboard slabs, just waiting for the drum-heavy second part to take over; Mike Rutherford considers it one of the best things the band ever did, which is something that makes me actually lose respect for the guy. I like Banks’ mischievous little synth texture of “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” but the song is also unforgivably long, with more of that flute. Wouldn’t it have been better to ditch these two songs and the instrumental and just written more songs like “Invisible Touch?”
Consider …Calling All Stations… the Squeeze of the 1990s: an album released with practically zero involvement from its founding and/or key members. Phil Collins is no longer here, replaced by *checks liner notes* Ray Wilson (who?) of *checks Wikipedia* Stiltskin (what?). It’s a garish mix of the worst tendencies of 1990s’ grunge guitar and 1980s’ synth and drums — the worst part of both decades! I think it’s funny that the band thought that the Latin American conga was appropriate for a song about Congo, the country, but maybe I expected too much from the band that gave us “Illegal Alien.” The consensus is that We Can’t Dance (with Collins back around) is apparently much better but I say who cares: less shit is still shit. ...Calling All Stations gets more hate simply because it's easier to pick on a band missing one-third of its members (actually three-fifths). Opener “No Son of Mine” just sounds lame with its metronome drum programming, but at least it has that odd synth tone that makes you wonder what this band is going to do with it. Will it be a return to the scare-quotes ‘darker’ sound of Wind and Wuthering, perhaps? And then, of course, Phil Collins starts singing, and it's the same old story: simple words in a non-existent tune, delivered as if it were the profound thing ever. For an album that spawned six singles, you’d think at least one of them would come with a hook worth remembering, but either the songs are outright bad or not memorable at all. AOR drums and compressed grunge guitars are my kryptonite. Gun to my head between these two albums? I take the bullet.
From Genesis to Revelation - B- Trespass - B- Nursery Cryme - B+ Foxtrot - A+ Selling England by the Pound - A+ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway - A- A Trick of the Tail - B Wind & Wuthering - C+ ...And Then There Were Three - C+ Duke - B- Abacab - B Genesis - B Invisible Touch - C We Can't Dance - F Calling All Stations - F