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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
GENERIC GENESIS, July 8, 2005
Just when we were about to write Genesis off as a relic from the prog rock dinosaur age, came this dazzling 1983 album which secures the band's progressive rock sound, their later penchant for Top 10 hit singles, and adds a signature reminder, without bowing to the new wave and post punk of the day, that they are just a damn good rock band, capable of writing music outside the box regardless of classification. The mix of great songs, (Mama, Home By The Sea, Taking It All Too Hard, Illegal Alien), and worthwhile filler material, (Second Home By The Sea, Just A Job To Do, Silver Rainbow), defines Genesis as an odd geometric shape, like the album cover picture. You accept and love the lesser material as a testement to Genesis's time and place in 1983, it sounds today like a 'before it's time' enhanced CD with bonus tracks. What secures this album as a pop masterpiece, as good as the compositions are, is Phil Collins fiery, growling, soft and complicated vocal tracks.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Everything that is GREAT about Genesis...., October 8, 2001
This was the first Genesis album I ever owned. I saw the video for "Mama" on MTV when it was new, and I just had to have the album. I hoped that the rest of the songs were as good as "Mama", and I was NOT disappointed!! "Mama" is a very dark, almost scary song (and their best video, bar none!!). It's almost deliberately unclear as to whether the song is about a man who loves a prostitute (the official story), or whether it is anti-abortion. The lyrics can be interpreted either way. This was the first time that the drums carried the melody over the guitar and keyboards. Only a drummer of the skill of Phil Collins could take simple drums and work the magic that he does. There's never been a song like it before or since. While "Mama" is worth the purchase price alone, the other songs don't fail to deliver, either. "That's All" follows "Mama" with a big musical shift. It's a quiet, peppy song that rises above all the other broken-heart songs out there. "Home by the Sea/Second Home by the Sea" - anyone who says that Genesis abandoned prog music has never heard this song. It's about a cat burglar who breaks into a semmingly empty house on the beach, only to find it inhabited by a club of ghosts, and he is the newest member. Tony Banks does an excellent job of imparting an otherworldly, eerie feel to this song. "Illegal Alien" - the most lighthearted song on the album, a tongue-in-cheek look at the world of, well, illegal aliens. A lot of people over the years have denigrated this song, but I really enjoy it. It also spawned a hilarious MTV video with the band dressed up as Mexican officials. The CD liner notes include a few stills from the video - nice toupee Phil! The remaining songs on the album are all good, if not quite as great as the ones listed above. "Taking it All too Hard" was a minor hit for Genesis, and yet has been (for some reason) ignored on their future live sets, box sets, and greatest hits compilations. Finally, I must say a word about the cover. I don't know who had the idea of a dark, blurry photo of the ten shapes from the Tupperware child's shape sorter globe, but whoever it is deserves an award. The cover does an excellent job of capturing the spirit of the album - Fairly dark and vague in overall tone, but with a large touch of whimsy. This album is one of the classics from the early 80s, and it is something that no Genesis fan should be without! I just hope that someday Genesis releases the videos to "Mama" and "Illegal Alien" on DVD!!
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It was official now; Genesis were superstars!, February 29, 2004
At the start of the MTV generation in the early 1980s, most veteran bands faced a dicey proposition. Now that visual image was becoming even more of a factor in a musician's success than it was in the past, did that mean being older and having been around the business longer mean things would work against you now? In a few cases, some musicians and bands saw their stock rise now that something like MTV would help increase their audiences by millions. One band was Genesis.By 1983, Genesis had been a trio for 5 years, and saw their success slowly increase as the years went by. If that wasn't enough, their drummer-turned-leader Phil Collins was pursuing a solo career that would almost eclipse his band's in terms of popularity and records sold. Their days as a progressive rock collective were long gone, and even though they retained some aspects from that era, pop music was now their bread & butter, and with albums like their 1983 self-titled, fans who stuck around need not have worried if too much success would cloud the band's judgement. It's amazing that after Phil Collins released 2 best-selling solo albums, he was willing to get back together with his full-time band to create an album that further broke Genesis through to the mainstream, perhaps helped by Phil's success on his own. Unlike previous albums, where individual members might contribute their own songs, all 9 songs on GENESIS were composed by the group together, proving that no amount of solo success could tear them apart. Genesis had been no stranger to the top 40 by early 1984, but they finally reached the top 10 with "That's All" peaking at #6. A relentlessly upbeat piano pop song, perhaps some fans wondered about Genesis' motivation towards abandoning their progressive past once they heard this song. Yet a little melody goes a long way, and certainly if it was Genesis' most poppy song to date, it was still miles above the typical pop product of the time. Of course, the fact MTV gave the video for "That's All" frequent rotation was some bearing on it. Interestingly, that song was the highest charting single from the album, while the three others didn't even see top 40 action. Nevertheless, they're all just as good as (and maybe better than) "That's All". The creepy (where did Tony Banks come up with those keyboard lines?) first single "Mama" only managed #73, belying its parent album's eventual big success. Perhaps the fact that this was one of the songs that could easily have been at home on progressive-era Genesis albums (particularly music-wise) didn't win over those fans who had been hooked by the band's more accessible material. However, "Mama" does feature one of Phil Collins' finest vocal performances & Lord can you feel his anguish! "Illegal Alien" has long been the song off of GENESIS that I could play over & over again, and never get tired of it. Just missing the top 40 (reaching #44), to me this is simply a fun, catchy number that also has some political subtext to it. Yet I'm surprised to see that some people have thought "Illegal Alien" to be offensive and even xenophobic (when in fact, it's quite the opposite). Hopefully, there are some thicker-skinned listeners out there, who may also want to check out the video for it if they get the chance (I didn't see it until later in life, but it's a load of fun just like the song itself). "Taking It All Too Hard" was not a bad song, if really just a lightweight ballad-type tune that Genesis maybe could have written in their sleep. The fact that this song stopped at #50 after being released nearly a year since GENESIS was released is maybe evidence that the band's label was milking the album's success for every last drop. I could see "Taking It All Too Hard" on one of Phil's albums, just not Genesis'. The remaining album tracks are no slouches in their own right, and just because they never saw as much airplay as their more successful cousins doesn't mean they're not worth a mention. "Home By The Sea" & its partly-instrumental counterpart "Second Home By The Sea" is another way Genesis reminds listeners of their earlier days as FM radio darlings with a 2-part progressive-inspired extravaganza that would be repeated & refined on INVISIBLE TOUCH's "Domino". "Just A Job To Do" is a funk-driven number that sounds a little close to ABACAB's "No Reply At All" in sound (only without the horns), but is a fine rocker that I'm sure would have fit the tone of that ABC series THE INSIDERS well (I was maybe too young to remember it). "Silver Rainbow" is another Genesis pseudo-love song like "Taking It All Too Hard", but Genesis seems to inhabit this song better than its predecessor. "It's Gonna Get Better" closes the album out with a song that apparently points out the ruthlessness of the big city, where backstabbers outnumber the good Samaritans. However, there's always the hope that goodness still survives and, somehow, you will get through it. When GENESIS became Genesis's largest-selling album to date, it naturally came with a double edge. On the one hand, the band now had a larger audience than ever before in their history. But on the other, those fans who had stuck with Genesis ever since the beginning saw reason to complain that they were no longer the same band they had loved in the first place; their music was now more polished and normal than anything off of FOXTROT or THE LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY. Perhaps the ones complaining the least were Genesis themselves, who were now suddenly household names & saw no reason not to continue in the same direction for the next decade or so. If 1978's ...AND THEN THERE WERE THREE was Genesis' official entry into the mainstream, GENESIS was their introduction to the front ranks of it.
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