Saturday 22 October 2011

Day 45: Genesis - Nursery Cryme

Dear Nathaniel,

Hello my angel, I love you. Was up very late last night after driving to pick up some friends and driving them home. Probably wouldn't have gone to bed early anyways but I'm feeling very sick so I ended up getting up a lot later. It's hard to get to sleep but it's even harder to get up. I just get up and look forward to playing some music to you.

Tonight I decided we're going to do a trilogy of albums, the best three albums of Genesis. We'll be listening to Nursery Cryme tonight and then Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound the next two nights. These three albums were created under the direction of visionary band leader Peter Gabriel who led the band until after the abomination that was The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. But before his ideas got too far ahead of him these albums are absolute masterpieces.

Genesis of course went on top replace Peter Gabriel with their drummer Phil Collins have made dreadful music ever since. But for three years in the 70's Genesis were one of the greatest bands making progressive rock. It's a huge shame that their main popularity came from their pop albums of the 80's which have caused a lot of people to merely shudder at their name and not appreciate the greatness that they once had.

The great thing about the progressive rock movement was that there wasn't one specific sound, the whole point of prog was to experiment and create new types of music and it leads to a great collection of eclectic bands under the same banner. Genesis have an absolutely amazing and very accessible sound to them during this era with an interesting mix between organ, piano and guitar. Genesis remind me a bit of Gentle Giant in their members being multi-instrumentalists, not to the same extent as Gentle Giant of course but it gives the same type of feel to their recordings that feature a lot of different instruments.

Peter Gabriel himself went on to create a variety of interesting albums after his departure from Genesis which we can explore at a later time, but a lot of his Genesis brilliance is apparent in these later recordings, even if they come in a very different style.

I hope you enjoyed the prog stylings of Genesis my angel, and I hope you're ready for more tomorrow with Foxtrot and then Selling England By the Pound. I've figured that bands that release a range of quite similar material can be appreciated better if we focus on them for awhile, or at least through their classic albums. After this I'm not sure if we should ease into fusion or just keep up the study of certain bands and albums, we'll see how I feel. Goodnight my angel Nathaniel.

Love from Dad.

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