From: Felix1shoe@aol.com
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 16:35:59 -0400
To: paperlate@ansto.gov.au
cc: Felix1shoe@aol.com
Subject: Peculiar reviews
Sender: paperlate-owner@ansto.gov.au
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: Felix1shoe@aol.com
"...Yes was probably the best-known and best-selling of the art rock attractions. A band that went through no less than seven personnel permutations in its twelve-year history, Yes blended neoclassical posturings with unchecked virtuosity and middlebrow mythologizing and went on to earn the awestruck adulation of a mass audience. But, by far, the most intriguing group of art rockers of the period was a weird aggregate of first-chair players with an out-of-control passion for melodrama named Genesis.
"Like their counterparts, Genesis was given to showing off their instrumental prowess at the drop of a beat, often playing their suite-length song stories in deliberately bizarre time signatures and filtering everything through so much circuitry that it took on a kind of ozone stench. Featuring singer Peter Gabriel (who wore his hair in a reversed mohawk - long on the sides, shaved down the middle) and singer/percussionist Phil Collins, Genesis created some of the strangest, most viscerally unsettling music of all time. To say that Genesis' work was distinctive was to miss the mark: it all sounded like it was issuing from one vast organism, chuffing and thumping and tooting along all by itself.
"It may have taken a while to get used to what Genesis was up to musically, but nothing could quite prepare the unwary listener for the subject matter of their material. Over the course of four early- to-mid seventies albums - "Nursery Cryme," "Foxtrot," "Selling England by the Pound," and the nightmarish "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" - the band inflated a ghastly universe full of monsters and ghosts and netherworldish wraiths of every description. It was a Boschian musical landscape where the sacred and the obscene jostled for a foothold and nothing was as it seemed. Genesis created a genuine spiritual intensity, all right; the intensity of a bad acid trip or a medieval passion play. "Supper's Ready", occupying nearly the entire second side of "Foxtrot", is as good an example as any of the band's creepy genius. The song cycle alternates between moments of mystery - as in the "Lover's Leap" and "As Sure as Eggs is Eggs" - and dire Wagnerian thunderclaps, all meant to approximate the climactic last chapters of the Book of Revelation. As a musical composition, "Supper's Ready" has a dizzying centrifugal pull; as some sort of spiritual art, it borders on the lunatic.
"The same might be said for the famous Genesis live shows, in which Gabriel would transform himself with elaborate masks and costumes into the characters peopling the band's convulsive fantasies. If there was anything more nerve-wracking than hearing Genesis perform, it was watching them perform, an event not unlike stepping defenseless onto someone's epileptic seizure. It all came to a head on "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", Gabriel's last gasp with the group and a double album of inpenetrable density in which Rael, the hero, battles hordes of deadly metaphors. "Keep your fingers out of my eye," begin the copious liner notes of this astonishingly unpleasant album. "While I write I like to glance at the butterflies in glass that are all around the walls. The people in my memory are pinned to events I can't recall too well, but I'm putting one down to watch him break up, decompose and feed another sort of life." It was a positively sunny sentiment compared to what lurked on the vinyl."
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I have always considered the above snippet to be one of the most peculiar, but accurate, descriptions of Genesis. When I am asked about my favorite band by a new person, I suggest that they read Davin Seay's description, and listen to "Supper's Ready" and "Lamb." It makes a good weeding-out process. }:o)---->
Felix
