Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

When it comes to Genesis, the rich tapestry of the band which started out from Charterhouse Public School and ended up as one of the biggest Progressive Rock groups ever, doesn’t neatly divide fans one way or the other in terms of musical values in certain eras, it manages to do it during the course of an album as well.

For many Genesis fans, the eras themselves seem to be self-explanatory, there is the creative dominance of the Peter Gabriel years with Foxtrot, Selling England By The Pound and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway nearly always being cited at the finest moments in the band’s history, The late 70s and early 80s era in which the now threesome of Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins became mega stars filling out stadium after stadium and in which Duke, Abacab and Invisible Touch were sought after records for a different reason and then the mix, the era in which Trick of The Tail and Wind And Wuthering can be seen as arguably the imagination gone wild period in which the guitarist Steve Hackett was the shining star.

For even during all these albums, there will be fans who skip through certain tracks claiming them to be exhausting to listen to and there will be songs that the listener is ready to listen to over and over again. Perhaps none in the later years of the band exemplify this approach so much as the 1983 self-titled album Genesis.

Even the front cover of the album can cause much discussion amongst fans. Gone were the days of the sleeve telling a story, so it seemed. The art work of previous Genesis albums were ones in which to sit and stare at for hours as you discovered more and more complex layers. The Lamb…with its rich deep black and white photography captured the spirit of New York perfectly, Selling England By The Pound’s cover extolling the virtues of the English pastoral and Wind and Wuthering showing the delicate imbalance of nature and humanity’s need to see patterns and normality in something that really isn’t there, all these previous albums had gone hand in hand with the pleasure of listening to the tracks on the record.

Genesis though was different, even more so than Abacab’s and Duke’s. The cover showed a familiar child’s game of blocks in which you had to put them in the right holes in which to win the game, a simple learning tool in which recognition was the key. However what can be seen from this seemingly haphazard display on the cover is the tools of the game without their receptacle, the container in which the band had neatly been put in for many years; the arty world of Progressive Rock was nowhere to be seen. All that was left was the blocks themselves. The blocks somehow need somewhere else to go and in that the band left, almost, Prog behind. They were now odd shapes finding the round hole in which to slot in.

The album somehow manages to do the same thing. It wasn’t a sudden departure away from the art of story-telling, of myths, magic, long heroic battles and the usual Progressive ideals. Even Duke still manages to have the notion of Prog within its boundary during the songs that deal with Duke himself, however come side two of Genesis, the Progressive element seems to disappear.

Side One for the most part is haunting, there is a shiver of excitement as the drum sound of Mama kicks in, the spectral sound of Phil Collins laughing demonically as the ode to a prostitute makes it way through some steamy, obsessional and interesting lyrics. That’s All is out and out pop, a single waiting to happen and the closer of the side, the outrageously good Home By The Sea/ Second Home By The Sea, despite the amount of electronic work to be heard is perhaps the last great throw of the dice to that idea of lengthy story-telling that the group had nurtured since the 1970 album The Knife.

Side Two was different, to many it is very good, an example of what was to come in Invisible Touch, the greater reliance on Phil Collins’ ever growing confidence, not just as the vocalist but as a song-writer which had matured during the early part of his solo career.

The five tracks that make up the B side range from what can be termed slightly offence in some quarters, Illegal Alien, to the actually all right Taking It All To Hard. The problem being is that Side One really gets down, deep and dirty, it infuses a love of the band that had come all the way through the 70s with its various departures of key musicians, the survival of the Punk phenomenon in which many Progressive groups fell by the way side and the move into a more radio friendly era, the second set of songs wouldn’t have been amiss from being part of a solo collection by any member of the three remaining members. A Yin and Yang juxtaposition.

Genesis is one of those albums that if you stopped at the end of the first four tracks and went no further, you would hail it as a work of genius but at the back of the mind a nagging small voice would be whispering, “Yes it might not stand up as great work, and some of it doesn’t really deserve the Genesis tag but what the hell, it’s good fun.”

Ian D. Hall