genesis: duke

Some of Phil's solo stuff is legitimately slammin.

no jacket required has Take Me Home on it, there is nothing wrong with that song.

Almost everything Phil plays on up to and including No Jacket is worthwhile, imo. Virtually nothing since, really, save a few Genesis songs and one or two guest spots, maybe. Regardless, he's the epitome of a guy who has done so much almost undeniably good stuff that still unjustifiably gets people shrugging and saying, "yeah, but so what, what else has he done?"

Hmm. Face Value on now. 'In The Air Tonight' is still as potent as ever, and 'The Roof is Leaking' into 'Droned' is a really nice moment. The version of 'Behind The Lines' on this isn't as good as the version on Duke, though, and the second half of the record is a bit of a slog. 'If Leaving Me Is Easy' in particular is bland, go-nowhere smoothness. 'Hand in Hand' has a promising intro, but then the horns come in and it turns into chat show theme tune music.

I like his version of 'Tomorrow Never Knows', though!

I Missed Again is a jam.

I Missed Again is beautiful. I take If Leaving Me is Easy as his attempt to write a John Martyn track with keyboards.

"In The Air Tonight" was supposed to be on Duke, but Banks voted it out, apparently. Still, that tune and a handful of other singles (most notably, "Easy Lover") is the only "solo" Collins i'll go back to.

Almost everything Phil plays on up to and including No Jacket is worthwhile, imo. Virtually nothing since, really

agreed with the first point, disagreed with the second as i like most of invisible touch

Oh, my bad, I totally meant to include Invisible Touch. I forgot that came out right after No Jacket!

Hello, I Must Be Going is pretty slept on. "I Cannot Believe it's True" is a monster of a tune, best use of the EWF horns ever. Ditto for "It Don't Matter to Me". Funky Phil rules.

Well, I managed to get through those quite quickly (there's only 8 LP's, after all) ... I'll elaborate later, but basically I'd rank 'em like this:

Duke > Invisible Touch > Abacab > Genesis >>> all Phil Collins solo albums.

However, his solo work is not all terrible - there's one or two good (even great in the case of 'In the Air Tonight') tracks on each album - including No Jacket Required, which still mostly feels to me like it should come with a free briefcase and filofax. Also: horns - love 'em on Parliament and Prince records, sound incredibly tacky on Phil Collins records.

A lot of '70s Genesis fans tend to see the '80s Genesis as the moment when Phil Collins started dragging the band in a more pop direction, but I disagree with this. If anything, '80s Genesis was Banks and Rutherford dragging Collins away from blandness.

Heathaze is great, as is the whole Duke's Travels/End - but it's got to be Duchess for me. Just that transition from trippy new age drum machine reverie (sounds like some tranquil Amazonian paradise, teeming with insect life) into crashing, colossal and psychedelic anthemisms will never not thrill me. I wish it went on for hours and hours.

"I Cannot Believe it's True" is a monster of a tune, best use of the EWF horns ever. Ditto for "It Don't Matter to Me". Funky Phil rules.

Also this. The drums on IDMTM - shuffling, shifting, tumbling over each other without ever not being in the pocket, are mind-blowing.

It's an unpopular opinion, but I too prefer ATTW3. They sound far more of a unit on Duke, but the previous album to me is as underrated as it comes. Let the album gets very little love, least of all from the band

*yet

I'm happy to play the Geir role here. I like prog Genesis, not pop Genesis. Duke has plenty of fine moments, but it signalled the beginning of the end for me and I have no use for anything that came after. ATTWT is great because it merges pop concision with a prog sensibility.

pvmic

The drumming throughout Duke is pretty spectacular, particularly on the last couple of tracks.

There's a really cool drum effect in "I Don't Care Anymore" (one of my fave Phil vocal tracks). It starts out big and roomy - his Bonham sound - and then they gradually shift from the room mics to the close mics and the sound gets super tight, controlled and compressed. It's really neat.

I guess when it boils down to it - I rate Collins highly as a drummer, and as a singer I think he's got a great voice. As a songwriter though, I find him frustratingly inconsistent and I suspect a lot of the material I've enjoyed on Genesis records has come from either Banks or Rutherford.

I suspect Mike Rutherford is the secret weapon here. An at-times canny bassist & arranger, passable guitarist in the Andy Summers mold, and pretty crafty with the pop hooks. Even the big Mechanics hits, Patrick Bateman aside, have staying power.

He's a pretty boring guitarist. And while after a while the band credits all the songwriting collectively, which makes it hard to tell who does what, don't underestimate the amount of cheesy music and lyrics that have come from Banks and Rutherford. Phil gets way too much blame on that front, whether you like the cheesy stuff or not.

Was it Soto that observed Banks' uncanny ability to always pick the worst preset synth sound for every song?

I have no doubt that Banks and Rutherford have also been involved in creating some awful music, but given how much I prefer the '80s Genesis records to Phil Collins' solo stuff, I could probably put a safe bet on my favourite Genesis material either being written by Banks or Rutherford, or they were the starting point of the composition.

As a guitarist, Rutherford mostly gets out of the way, in contrast, say, to the hammy Daryl Stuermer. I'm not being critical of Phil, and I'm sure there's cheese sprayed from all directions, I just suspect that Mike's role in the band's pop turn is key. Tony's solo material, at least what I've heard of it, is tuneless and plodding, much as I love his big operatic chords and proggy arpeggios in Genesis. I guess I've come around to Mike as the band's invisible hand.

Banks was certainly their most gifted composer. Wind & Wuthering, my pick for best Genesis album ever, was mostly written by him. And his first solo album A Curious Feeling is a gem.

banks is also def mvp on the lamb imo

I tweeted this to chaki
But I often think of breaking up Yes and Genesis, and reforming: Gabriel, Hackett, Howe, Squire, Collins, and Banks

Genesyes

Another thing I like about Duke is that it's one of those records where you can tell the band knew what they were going for, and what kind of record they were trying to make. Therefore, you've still got the prog, but the new wave elements are brought into the sound in a very natural way, with some passionate vocal performances and great rhythm section work. There's plenty of hooks, but it isn't all-out pop. It reminds me of Rush's early '80s work in that sense.

And while after a while the band credits all the songwriting collectively, which makes it hard to tell who does what, don't underestimate the amount of cheesy music and lyrics that have come from Banks and Rutherford.

when I learned that Rutherford wrote the awful lyrics to "Land of Confusion," I wept with gratitude, thinking Collins had been exonerated.

Again - Invisible Touch - the band knew what they were going for and hit the mark.

Compare this with the noticeably more confused and patchy Abacab and Genesis - which, although they have their highlights, are essentially both the sound of three rich, successful men dicking about. Some of it works, some of it doesn't.

ehhh i think both abacab and the s/t are considerably better and hit their respective marks better than invisible touch, much as touch kinda represents the total solidification of the style they'd been heading toward since duke

when I learned that Rutherford wrote the awful lyrics to "Land of Confusion," I wept with gratitude, thinking Collins had been exonerated.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, July 4, 2017 3:51 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wouldn't have bothered weeping for the guy that wrote 'Another Day In Paradise' before fucking off to Switzerland, myself.

every song on abacab is great, the s/t is only marred by illegal alien

though i guess the worst song on invisible touch ("anything she does") isn't as bad as "illegal alien"

God, "Duchess" IS amazing. I voted too soon.

i guess the mark for abacab would be "hella progged out new wave record" and the mark for the s/t would be "pop record with slippery prog edges" and the mark for invisible touch would be "geometrically precise pop record but also featuring 'domino'"

three rich, successful men dicking about.

but that's Genesis since 1977! it's description, not criticism. Banks is too uptight and Rutherford and Collins too practical in the what-is-this-bullshit sense for me to ever take their attempts at Gabriel-esque tales of chivalric doom seriously.

'Illegal Alien' is indeed terrible, indefensible shit, but then again so is 'Who Dunnit?' ...

Personally, I don't think Invisible Touch has a bad track on it, and I definitely think that song-for-song it crushes Abacab. I'm not going to be making any Batemanesque comments about it being their undisputed masterpiece, but it's one of their strongest records, IMO.

The eponymous album sounds more like a would-be Collins solo record than Invisible Touch does.

"who dunnit" is fun as hell and there's nothing on invisible touch that even approaches "abacab" the song but let's agree to disagree

The eponymous album sounds more like a would-be Collins solo record than Invisible Touch does.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, July 4, 2017 9:05 AM (seven seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

between "home by the sea" and "silver rainbow" i really disagree

you could say that about "mama" though

On Duke and Invisible Touch were written by three rich, successful men, but I get no sense of dicking about and fumbling for a direction on those records - they knew what they were doing.

*-On

I wouldn't have bothered weeping for the guy that wrote 'Another Day In Paradise' before fucking off to Switzerland, myself.

Phil defends himself pretty forcefully from this in his book. I think he got shit for being a tax avoider or something, but that had nothing to do with it. The woman he married (and recently remarried, iirc) was Swiss, and her whole family, including aging parents, was in Switzerland, so he was basically, why wouldn't I move to Switzerland?

oh, think twice

In Too Deep's lovely as well, if I'm honest.

Also, Abacab onwards, Genesis albums (until the awful We Can't Dance) are a lean 47 minutes or so

We Can't Dance, Be Here Now, Disintegration, Daydream Nation - the four tenants of the 12 track, 71 minute album.

The latter-half sections of both Knight and Volcano are both Steve-driven and seemingly dropped from later live performances

well that's just 3 - Abacab, Genesis, and Invisible Touch. and I think all those are still longer than any album by say King Crimson, at least until the CD era

the outlier in their catalogue is Nusery Cryme...not even 40 minutes!! wow!

Eh, We Can't Dance is not all bad. "Driving the Last Spike," "Dreaming While You Sleep," "Fading Lights," those three long ones are pretty good, and together they run almost 30 minutes, lol. For the short ones, I don't really like the singles much, tbh, and a lot of the tracks do veer closer to Phil Collins solo dreck than most Genesis material does, but I do like "Tell Me Why" and "Living Forever," which kind of sounds like it could be slotted between self-titled and "Invisible Touch."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHx9MqCfCjw

Controversial Genesis opinion: nearly all the 70s-era albums would be improved by lopping 15 minutes off the running time.

No argument here. They all have at least that much that is a bit dull or underwhelming, especially Lamb which otherwise is my favorite album but really would've been better as a single LP (albeit one on the long side).

It's funny how they celebrated the dawn of the CD era by making shorter albums

(Until WCD obviously)

Think a lot of my emnity towards WCD comes from the fact that I'd been a Genesis obsessive in my pre-teens, but WCD had the misfortune to arrive at the same time as Nirvana's Nevermind and my finally getting into music for kids of my age, and I felt I had to reject it. But also, I remember buying the CD out of curdled loyalty when it came out, and besides the chorus to No Son Of Mine, which I loved, it all felt like middle-aged-man ballads and old people shit. And then there was I Can't Dance, which was and is execrable. Perhaps I should revisit it.

That live thing, 'The Way We Walk: The Longs' has Fading Lights and Driving... and is a good context in which to listen to the record, but not.

I saw em at Knebworth on that tour, a mate got free tickets through his sister. And it was so removed from this band that I'd had such an intense, solitary relationship with when I was 11 or so, I remember feeling really weirdly about the whole thing (also we saw Steve Punt reviewing in the VIP section for a broadsheet w/his notepad out). But I'd be up for checking it out now.

I bloody love Domino so I'm definitely open to it being good.

Halfway thru the "old medley" and loving it of course

Argh and then Phil drops some lines from Illegal Alien in I Know What I Like, like a turd slipping into the gravy

eeets noh fahn