Genesis

Wind and Wuthering

Blood On the Rooftops, Venice in the Spring...

Review Score:

(10/10)
... odd that some 28 years later this, the best of all the Genesis records, should suddenly seem so of the moment and to the point. American journalists and construction workers get their heads lopped off by Islamic hate-mongers with an insatiable thirst for blood and vengeance. "For his name they could slaughter, for his name they could die..." I know what I like about this CD, always have: the melodies are not prog-rock at all, but extraordinarily well crafted vignettes whose stories deal with fundamentalist murder, the legacy of war handed down from father to son, whimsical allegory (a fat cat is killed by an avenging super-mouse), ruminations on the Middle East, love lost in an afterglow, the redemption in the heart of one who turns the world so it's facing the way that you're going. In short, all of our moments of desperation.
The musicianship positively crackles throughout. None of them would ever be this good again. "Wot gorilla?" and "Unquiet slumbers" are filled with hairpin turns and polyrhythmic shifts that only an artist at the very peak of his powers could negotiate. Banks' keyboards have a chamber like quality that set him immediately apart from all other British tinklers. Collins was still a drummer with something to prove both behind and in front of the drum kit. Rutherford was underpinning the songs and adding depth to the guitars in sublime ways, and Hacket, well, at this point, this was Hackett's band and he took them musically to where they had been striving from their inception at Charterhouse School. Plus, he penned the ultimate song that is so absolutely haunting, given the abominations run rampant as Western Civilization and Islam confront each other in this deadly Crusade to obliterate each other.
The remaster has taken what was always a sterling album and given it new life. It is a joy to listen to this again. Still what hangs with you after you have thought about all that is said is Hackett's observation:
"Seems Helen of Troy has found a new face again...."

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