Monday 28 January 2013

LaRM day 173 (Genesis)

Come and touch me, why don't you touch me?  Well, one look at Peter Gabriel in his creepy old man mask would answer the question, but there's no denying the theatrically absurd brilliance of much of Genesis' breakout album, their third, Nursery Cryme (1971).  Nursery Cryme is absolute and unadulterated proggus maximus.  Prog may have got cracking in the late 1960's and Yes may have churned out some extremely complicated prog workouts, but Nursery Cryme was the point at which everything proggish coalesced into a completely hermetically sealed, and quite specifically English, context. Not only is the music ridiculously complex, but thematically Gabriel had introduced linking stories and ideas between the songs to create, not a concept album, but a pastorally quaint concept entire, and as a result Nursery Cryme sounds like a song cycle.  There is a skewed version of subtlety at work as well.  Where Yes were making laughably overblown records, Nursery Cryme is strangely intimate, and despite it's convoluted song structures, has time for some genuine melody and even a low-key pop sensibility shows up from time to time.  That's doesn't stop 10 minute opener 'The Musical Box' from being a grandstander, flitting about all over the show.  It's a fantastic piece of work, and shows off new Genesis recruit Phil Collins' hugely important impact on the band.  Similarly over the top is 'Return of the Giant Hogweed', a rolling, thundering slice of multi-movement prog in which Tony Banks tries to outdo Keith Emerson for idiotically dramatic keyboard work.  It's great stuff, but to be honest 'The Musical Box', 'Return of the Giant Hogweed' and album closer 'The Fountain of Salmacis' (which has lovely little flashes of charming vocal melody from Gabriel) are the real highlights of the album, the other five shorter songs are pretty forgettable (or, in the case of 'Harold the Barrel', terrible).  'Seven Stones' is OK but relies too heavily on Banks' cod-classical keyboard fugues and has an uneasily sloppy chorus, 'For Absent Friends' is alright too, but suggests that they shouldn't have let Collins start writing songs so early after joining the band, and 'Harlequin' too crassly betrays the band's debts to Pink Floyd.  There are problems with Nursery Cryme, but nevertheless it really was the definitive starting point for a totally unified sense of what British prog was and could be.











Fourth album Foxtrot (1972) is often cited as the band's best, mainly because of the 23-minute opus 'Supper's Ready'.  The album gets off to a flying start with the rocking 'Watcher of the Skies' which is built on a brilliant Mellotron noise and juddering keyboard and guitar thuds, and a brilliant lyric and vocal line from Gabriel.  Things get a bit sappier with the much less convincing 'Time Table', which strangely foreshadows the easier fare that Genesis would serve up later in their post-Gabriel career.  It's a shame because the dark but lively 'Watcher of the Skies' sets you up for much more entertaining stuff than 'Time Table'.  Things get back on track with the churning prog of 'Get Em Out By Friday', which is another multi-movement 8-minute workout, but even so, it's not the greatest or most cohesive of Genesis' big, multi-part songs.  'Can-Utility and the Coastliners' is a fairly charming acoustic guitar based song, and 'Horizons' is a decent classical cribbing bit of prog frippery (as usual, when prog musicians want a bit of classical to riff on, Genesis turned to Bach).  But, with the exception of 'Watcher of the Skies', these songs are just a padding exercise, the throwaway prelude to the main act, side two's monumental (and monumentally ridiculous) 'Supper's Ready'.  'Supper's Ready' is huge in every sense.  It has six framing movements, but loads within those six and it's a patchwork quilt of ideas, both musical and lyrical, making one flowing, rolling piece of melodramatic prog, covering every conceivable theme, from childhood terrors to the formation of the world, from medieval life to ancient mythology, and although it's unspeakably daft, it's still bizarrely thrilling.  Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that it isn't ever a chore to listen to, despite being full of showy bits of soloing and unlimited excess, mainly because it never loses sight of melody and even when it's at it's most absurd, it still remembers to entertain rather than simply show off.











1973's Selling England by the Pound is a better album yet, despite having even more silly cultural allusions to a jarringly quaint Englishness.  Opener 'Dancing with the Moonlit Knight' starts off with medieval guitar filigrees and ends up a blisteringly over the top rock song, complete with synthesised choir and overdriven electric guitar work from Steve Hackett which is truly daft.  But once again, Gabriel's strong melodic sense runs through the song and saves it from being simply stupid prog (although Banks' squelchy keyboard solo is pretty stupid).  It kind of sets the tone for the whole album too, in that thematically it appears to be reflecting on the common topic of the transition from rural English pastoralism to cultural co-option (unstatedly the US) in an urban context, and the 12-minute 'The Battle of Epping Forest', the grandiose 'Firth of Fifth' and album closer 'The Cinema Show/Aisle of Plenty' revolve around the same theme.  There's a pop song (and chart "hit") in the superb 'I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)', which really demonstrates just how closely Genesis were able to tie prog to pop (it's far from being a standard pop song, but the chorus is pure pop hook), and also led to Gabriel's infamous impersonation of a lawn mower in the band's live shows.  The album has generally been under-appreciated, with reviews tending to focus on the obliqueness or showy silliness of the lyrics, while ignoring the tension and discomfort that lies beneath that silliness.  Musically the album is less dense than the preceding albums, and although still crazily convoluted, it's really pretty accessible.  There are down moments, particularly Collins' mawkish and forgettable 'More Fool Me' which is fairly ghastly, and Steve Hackett's 'After the Ordeal' is pretty pointless, but otherwise Selling England by the Pound is a great album, and a worthy precursor to the absolutely blistering slab of solid prog mayhem that was to follow.











The material on 1975's sprawling double-album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is musically much more precise and more direct than anything Genesis had recorded before, yet it's the densest, most impenetrable and easily the best record they ever made.  It's dark, jagged, mysterious, urban, a world away from the gently satirical English pastoralism of their previous work.  The whole exercise was undertaken in an atmosphere of increasing conflict, particularly between Peter Gabriel and Tony Banks and, as is so often the way, it was this antagonism that seems to have led directly to the band making their best work.  But, the fallout was to be that after one tour of the album Gabriel would leave the band in fury and under a cloud, with the rest of Genesis loudly and publicly expressing their irritation at the idea that the frontman's theatricality detracted from the music, and Gabriel retorting that they wouldn't amount to much without him.  In any event, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a prog record through and through, yet only three of its twenty-three songs break the 6-minute mark, it's a heads-down rock album but with spectacularly complex musical structures, and it's a pop record with no concessions made to popular taste whatsoever.  As a concept album it's one of the least narratively understandable, with a tale seemingly about a Puerto Rican street punk called Rael trying to stay alive in New York, but that's pretty much all you can really get from it, because Gabriel tells his story in such pointedly oblique terms that there's little point in trying to make sense of it all.  If anything, that obliqueness just makes the album all the more fascinating, and together the myriad classical references, the musical conflations and thematic numinousness makes for a really quite spectacular record.  For the first time, the slower numbers sound like really great and thematically appropriate instead of the jarringly pat mis-steps they had been previously and 'The Lamia' and particularly the wonderful 'Carpet Crawlers' are superb.  The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is difficult, absurd, insanely overblown, antagonistically brainy, and, if you're prepared to accept that it's Genesis that you're listening to, it's absolutely brilliant.  Now, there are many people who aren't prepared to accept that Genesis are anything other than total shit (I live with one for a start), but the thing is, sometimes you have to put your prejudices to one side and accept that you're wrong.  Because The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway really is absolutely brilliant.











After Gabriel's departure there wasn't really anywhere for the band to go but backwards, and they did just that, retreating to the gentler, more obviously prog style that they had been refining prior to The Lamb.  A Trick of the Tail is a decent enough prog album, but there isn't enough that really stands out, and after the previous album's outstanding bluster, A Trick of the Tail sounds like a band in retreat, and it's all a bit forgettable.  There are some good outings: 'Squonk' is pretty decent winding prog, opener 'Dance on a Volcano' is pretty beefy and the title track is nice.  But there are also worrying signs of what's to come with the lacklustre and silly 'Robbery, Assault and Battery' which manages to combine by-numbers prog with a second rate pop melody in its chorus. It's OK, and as a wounds-licking exercise it's absolutely fine, but it is an album that suggests that if the band wanted to keep moving forward they would need to start developing other ideas than the prog workouts they had relied on in the past.


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