Genesis 12 26

After Peter Gabriel departed for a solo career, Genesis embarked on a long journey to find a replacement, only to wind back around to their drummer, Phil Collins, as a replacement. With Collins as their new frontman, the band decided not to pursue the stylish, jagged postmodernism of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway – a move that Gabriel would do in his solo career – and instead returned to the English eccentricity of Selling England by the Pound for its next effort, A Trick of the Tail…

What happens when you take a master of progressive rock and an accomplished Nashville producer engineer, and put them together with a host of top-flight Nashville session players to reinterpret one of the most revered 70s prog double-albums? In the case of Spock s Beard drummer Nick D'Virgilio and producer engineer Mark Hornsby, you get Rewiring Genesis A Tribute To The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and it's fantastic. While the original featured layers of classic synthesizers (ARP, Mellotron, etc.), there's none of that fake string or choir stuff going on here. Besides rock guitar, bass, and Nick's great drumming (and tasteful lead vocal work), The Lamb is filled with real strings, huge vocal arrangements, horn sections, and even some accordion! Clearly, it's not attempting to simply re-record the classic, it's a fresh and beautiful sounding reinterpretation.

Arcangelo Corelliis one of the great composers of the Baroque era, a trailblazer who forever changed the relationship between soloist and orchestra, and did much to establish the violin as the star of the orchestra. He is considered the ‘father’ of the concerto grosso – apiece for several soloists accompanied by an orchestra – and his seminal Opus 6 volume became the benchmark for his contemporaries, including Handel, Vivaldi and Geminiani.

This debut Genesis album, which has appeared under license to various labels in addition to Decca and London in different configurations, is largely of historical interest. The group was still in its formative stages, the members barely past their 18th birthdays and still working out what they wanted to sound like. Mostly they sound like the Bee Gees trying to be the Moody Blues (picture something similar to the sound of the former group's Odessa album). "The Silent Sun" and "Where the Sour Turns to Sweet" are pleasant enough, but scarcely indicate the true potential of the group or its members. A pleasant enough piece of pop-psychedelia/art rock, but not a critically important release, except to the truly dedicated.

Mike Oldfield, watch out. This all-instrumental album, consisting of two long pieces ("Slow Dance Parts 1 and 2") that mix new age sounds with rock, crosses into territory staked out most successfully by the tubular bell-ringer, and comes off as sort of Windham Hill with a beat. This material features clarinet, oboe, flute, trumpet, harp, and percussion as well as guitar, and it does sort of resemble the spacy synthesizer interludes and bridges found as parts of the longer pieces on Genesis's progressive-era albums…

Platinum Collection is a career-spanning box set by British veteran progressive rock/pop rock band Genesis. It was released in 2004 in the UK and one year later in North America…

After Peter Gabriel departed for a solo career, Genesis embarked on a long journey to find a replacement, only to wind back around to their drummer, Phil Collins, as a replacement. With Collins as their new frontman, the band decided not to pursue the stylish, jagged postmodernism of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway - a move that Gabriel would do in his solo career - and instead returned to the English eccentricity of Selling England by the Pound for its next effort, A Trick of the Tail. In almost every respect, this feels like a truer sequel to Selling England by the Pound than Lamb; after all, that double album was obsessed with modernity and nightmare, whereas this album returns the group to the fanciful fairy tale nature of its earlier records…