Sometimes an album – even by an accomplished, frequently masterful group, can feel like a gigantic misstep. The hooks aren’t quite there; lyrics fall like lead balloons; love songs, bloated and unaffecting; the timing, which is everything, turns oddly sour in places where the band otherwise plies a deft hand.
That record in the Genesis catalog is 1976’s oddly off-putting work, Wind & Wuthering, a collection that feels neither here nor there. It demonstrates definite qualities: experimentation, tight production and craftsmanship, even wry wit; still, the sum feels much less than the total of its parts. Opening with two epic, sprawling songs (a bombastic, cynical, “Eleventh Earl of Mar” and the fantastically multi-layered, “One for the Vine”) the album settles in at nine tracks and just over fifty minutes. Other songs as highlights are the first song accused of being a “traditional love song” (Tony Rutherford’s mildly sappy, “Your Own Special Way”) and the instrumental, not to be confused with album filler (arguably a hymn to Frank Zappa’s ex-drummer, soon to be Genesis member Chester Thompson) “Wot Gorilla?” All these songs are pretty fair, but the culmination is decidedly underwhelming. The continued definition of this vintage as “post-Peter Gabriel” is fair, and although the band steadily made records and toured hard, the quality wavered pretty far from the flock for a band who had already ridden a wave with early career classics, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Foxtrot.
The extras on the second special features disc are pretty standard. They offer videos, interviews, DVD audio, but little that can make this ordinary effort anything close to essential. For fans of the group, this is of course, apt material; for those middling art-rock or Brit-rock fans, a copy of the original release would suffice. Or just not at all.
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