I vaguely recall this from my university days, I know that my prog-loving friends claimed it as the best (Peter Gabriel era) Genesis, but apart from Counting Out Time, the only things that jogged my memory were the opening (and title) lyric “And the lamb lies down on Broadway” and the brief lines from Here Comes The Supernatural Anaesthetist - “If he wants you to snuff it, all he has to do is puff it. He’s such a great dancer.”
Counting Out Time, a comic song about relying on manual instructions to overcome sexual naivety, stands out because it is a very different musical style to the rest of the album, which is a mix largely led by Tony Banks’ keyboards and Gabriel’s lyrics, of wandering tunes that evoke mood more than they do follow a particular musical arc. There are some nice largely instrumental work, especially Carpet Crawlers and the Krautrock creepiness of The Waiting Room, as well as some good soundtrack work for The Colony Of Slippermen and Ravine.
This is a concept double album, about a dreamlike journey undertaken by a young New Yorker named Rael. Gabriel apparently was inspired by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the works of Jung. It has elements of Greek myth (not least The Lamias), Dante, and other tales of descent into the underworld. At times I was reminded of parts of Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, which also borrows from the Orpheus myth, and certainly some of Margaret St Clair’s stories from my Appendix N reading - both The Sign of the Labrys and The Shadow People feature hallucinatory journeys into an underworld region.
Not least because the music and Gabriel’s dense and metaphorical lyrics evoke a hallucinatory experience to the album. The story, if you read it, is largely a load of old toss laden with psycho-sexual weirdness and castration fears, and the kind of modernistic body horror beloved of both Terry Gilliam and David Cronenburg – people shrink-wrapped on a production line in The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging, for example, or the grotesque lumpy and slippery appearance of the Slippermen, creatures made of foreskin. Throughout, Rael chases after the shade of his brother John, possibly killed in gang violence sometime in the past. The ending is left ambiguous – Rael attempts to save John from a subterranean river, sacrificing his own severed penis to do so, but we are left in doubt as to the outcome – Rael instead seems to ascend, perhaps the whole odyssey has been him casting aside worldly things like sex, consumerism, and his own identity, in order to ascend to higher state of being or consciousness.
In that sense, the overall complexity of the lyrics make it more interesting – it's open to interpretation. Some may call it pretentious, and it certainly dances on that line very closely. Crosses it a few times? Perhaps. I can see, also, how Marillion were very consciously inspired by Genesis. As is often the case, some of the sounds from Banks’ keyboards date it to a particular era, much like Keith Emerson's work dates the ELP albums.
I can certainly agree that this is a very Genesis album, pretty much encapsulating the Peter Gabriel era. It was, in a way, quite the revelatory experience that I think it was intended to be. To get the best from it, you’d probably need to listen to it a few times, analyse the lyrics more closely to pick out themes and metaphors (or maybe take something psychotropic), but alas I don’t have the time to do that.
Comments
Post a Comment