Imperial Aerosol POLL: The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis

Phil and Peter are both longtime soul/r&b fans, as their solo stuff would evince (if not always enforce).

kinda difficult to figure out what music PG actually wrote for the band, obviously he gets a lot of songwriting credits for the lyrics/conceptual stuff but none of his solo material sounds a thing like Genesis. outside of like the first song on his debut

Willow Farm from Supper's Ready was Gabriel's song too, he seemed to write in that jaunty piano-led style in his early days. Personally I could do without Counting Out Time and most of side 4. As I said on the Duke thread, remove about 15 minutes from most of the 70s-era Genesis albums and you have a better album.

Excuse Me from his first album is another of the Flanders & Swann numbers

Iirc Yes would always say their songs kept getting longer because everyone kept bringing in bits and pieces they didn't want cut.

xps I think Harold the Barrel was all PG too.

and yet their albums are pretty economical! outside of Tales of course. but I never really felt there was a lot of noodling or unnecessary bits on them, whereas yea every Genesis album from like 1971-1981 feels like it could've been trimmed

its kind of rough out there for people who collect prog vinyl, you got King Crimson albums that are full of dead quiet parts so you need clean vinyl, and Genesis stuffs 25-28 minutes on a side so you have to crank it meaning the surface noise is often a bit more pronounced. and you need a good stylus as well. but Yes doesn't have those problems :)

I think Harold the Barrel was all PG too.

lol my favorite genesis tune bar none

Love how Gabriel pronounces "Manhattan" like "man had honor" on the title track

yeah, I love that too, it's like, for just a moment, he's Mark E Smith

I’ve always been surprised that Back in NYC was not totally written by PG.

echoes of the broadway everglades

love how everything melts here

lol i'd forgotten the silly Bonzos break in "Counting Out Time"

I’ve always been surprised that Back in NYC was not totally written by PG.

yeah it does have a bit of a Dodo/Lurker/ABCAB feel to it. I still feel like that song is very future-feeling, and that they kind of retreated from this for the rest of the decade

haha Abacab.

I would have said that the one-bass-note-on-a-Taurus-pedal in "Back in NYC" is also very Mike Rutherford, but apparently he didn't start using them until 1976.

Love how Gabriel pronounces "Manhattan" like "man had honor" on the title track

― J. Sam

wait that lyric is "manhattan"?

i have a soft spot for "counting out time"... that guitar break sounds very enossified to my ears, and the lyric, well, the only way i could think to work out sex was by numbers ("try writing the alphabet with your tongue"), and it never really worked for me. so i found that song very relatable.

I'll admit I don't know a lot about the sex habits of Puerto Rican adolescent boys in 1974 New York, but I would assume Rael would be less likely to learn about sex from a presumably non-pornographic instruction manual than an upper-middle-class UK student at an all-male boarding school in the 60s would have been. That's a failure of characterization on Gabriel's part.

*embarrassed shrug*