Genesis - Selling England By the Pound

Boy, here's a band that has a fractured fan base, if ever there was one.  This is from the classic Peter Gabriel era, which is bloated Prog Rock with extra helpings of pretentiousness and wankery.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing in music, but they're the kinds of things that are best in small doses.  So far as Prog Rock went back when I was a kid (which was when it was far more widely accepted than it is these days), these guys were always what I considered second tier.  Mostly because their albums are so inconsistent.  In the mid 70's a Yes album was generally solid all the way through.  Yeah, the lyrics were always a deal breaker for a lot of people, but the songs were just tighter than most other Prog Rockers.  I know calling Genesis second tier is kind of blasphemous to a lot of Prog Rock dudes, but that's okay.  They aren't in it for the Rock of it anyway.

The issues I usually have with Genesis is that they come up with a pretty good song, and then when it's over they just keep noodling.  Like the opening track here, Dancing With the Moonlit Knight.  It's Kind of dumb, but it's Prog Rock and that's okay.  The problem isn't that it's dumb, it's that the song ends and then it gets really quiet and they tack on some kind of boring instrumental thing that had nothing to do with the song in the first place.  It's like sometimes they make songs long because it was expected in the genre, but they really only had a four minute idea anyway, so they tacked on four minutes of acoustic guitar strumming and piano noodling along with brushes on drums.  At least Yes usually told Steve Howe to stamp on an effect pedal and let it wail.  This wouldn't be so bad, but then we eventually come to what the fanboys (they're all boys, too - women don't listen to this era of Genesis) consider a true classic, A Firth of Fifth.  Complete with flute solo and dreamy keyboard and guitar interlude.  Again, it seems like pieces of songs just put together.

I don't want to sound like I'm bitching, though; because I'm really not.  That's just the style that was popular and at least they were trying to make interesting music and not just another Rock N' Roll album.  Did they always succeed?  Hell, no.  They always came up with something that was genuinely really good, like I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), where they just got everything right.  Sure, it's pretentious and it's mostly nonsense, but it's based on the painting on the album cover.  So it really seems to work, if you ask me. I know I liked looking at the cover while I listened to that song a lot when I was a kid.  Maybe it's that whole reach exceeding their grasp thing in some cases, but at least they tried.

I was in a store around here a little while ago and it was a work day, and I was spending my lunch hour in there.  It's a primarily Classic Rock kinda joint, and it's usually empty when I'm there.  But for whatever reason a bunch of dudes, mostly older than me, were in there just hanging out by the register and bullshitting.  Some of them were talking about music they had downloaded for free, which seems like a real breach of etiquette in a record store to me, but they got around to Genesis and this album.  I overheard the whole conversation because the recently arrived records are up by the register.  There was a younger guy up there, and I've never seen anyone but the owner working the store, because he was supposed to go out of business last fall, but people like me must show up just often enough to buy some used records (he has way too many cd's in stock) for him to keep going.  But when the conversation got to this album, the young guy got really excited and said it was a "perfect" record.  I feel bad for him because he's never gonna meet a girl if he thinks The Battle of Epping Forest is perfect.  Or even the song Phil Collins sings, More Fool Me, which really kind of points to the direction they'd eventually get to after Peter Gabriel left the band.  Obviously that's a lot easier to see now after that all happened, but it's there and we really can't say we weren't warned.

The other epic piece (I think piece is more apt than song here) would be The Cinema Show.  I never remember hearing this on the radio or at a party.  Come to think of it, a party with this record going would have been a trip!  Probably a bunch of guys going, "Ssshhh!  Listen!"  It's another kind of song where things are kind of patched together, but it was a staple of some old Genesis bootlegs, so I have a feeling the die hards really love it.  I think it holds together better than most of their really long songs, but it could probably use a little tightening up.  In fact, by this point I'm usually thinking Peter Gabriel should have been a little more prominent on the record.  It would really be interesting to see where a record like this would stand if it came out today and no one had ever heard it way back when.  Unfortunately, I think it would go totally unnoticed.  I think that would be a bad thing, because while it's uneven like most Genesis albums, the high points are really worth hearing.

So I think that while this is considered a true classic Genesis album, if you're not a huge Genesis fan you really may disagree with that assessment, and you wouldn't be wrong.  It may seem like it's a record I really don't like all that much, but it has a place in my collection because even though I like guitar based garagey punk stuff most of all, I have a soft spot in my heart for 70's Prog Rock and now and then I can sit back and enjoy it.  I wouldn't have any idea what pressing I have, but there's no bar code on it, so I may have bought this in high school.  It has some crackling here and there, but it's listenable and I don't see me rushing out to upgrade it anytime soon.