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Ross - 2004-01-29 11:07:28
I remember when I was about 16 there was quite a buzz about that record among my friends on L.I. . I don't remember ever hearing the whole thing.
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Paula - 2004-01-29 11:13:01
It's really...big. It's a big ol' record. PG is such a cheeseball, but I love him.
Relatedly, he and Eno are trying to start a musician's union.
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Adam - 2004-01-29 13:20:05
Heck, I haven't heard that album since college. But it's come up in conversation twice in the last few months. Hm. Oddly, the main character of the story, Rael, shares his name with the French UFO/human cloning guy. Lamb is released 11/74. Aliens contact UFO guy 12/73. I'll stop there.
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amattina - 2004-01-29 13:32:57
I loved that prog rock stuff when I was younger. Still think alot of it is cool. Yes, ELP, and all the accouterments that went along. But Genesis was a band I could just not get into. Stuff lacked sincerity at times.
Love PG though! Saw him a few years back with some friends of my wife. There was fight and everything, but thats for another post.
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Paula - 2004-01-29 13:41:51
Wow. French Rael site is fascinating. Thank you Adam, please call my boss and tell him I won't be working for the rest of the day.
Mattina: the lack of sincerity--the pretention--is what I find morbidly fascinating about Genesis.
Some of the post-PG but pre-MTV Genesis was really tuneful, too.
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Paula - 2004-01-29 13:42:25
Oops: pretension? Zat how it's spelled?
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Ross - 2004-01-29 14:05:14
Yeah, this is their site (Eno, Gabriel) poor Peter he looks more like me every day. Yes pretention, that's right, whereas "Zat" is, I believe, incorrect.
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The Supernatural Uneasethetist - 2004-01-29 17:12:22
Coincidentally, I just listened to Lamb the other day. I could go all postmodern on y'all, and note that there ain't no such thing as sincerity once a recording happens (unless, perhaps, it's a live-in-studio recording of a newly composed song done for the first time: everything else is performance) but even so, isn't it ironic that someone who was so very theatrical and "pretentious" (what was he pretending to?) in the early days now is so very earnest that you wish he'd scale back and be a little less sincere sometimes! One of the best moments on Lamb is the way "The Light Dies Down on Broadway" melds the verse of "The Lamia" with the chorus of the album's title track: there are lots of neat little tricks that make the album seem more thought-through than yr typical bloated prog-rock opus (which too often is just: my turn to play lots of notes real fast!).
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Paula - 2004-01-29 18:41:02
Although I was the one who actually used the word pretentious/pretension (and it still feels like I'm spelling it wrong), I have to agree with ya, SU.
I mean, there's artsy bombast and there's "I'm so soulful it hurts" and there's "I got the blues baby, even though I'm relatively well off and have many product endoresment deals" and there's "I'm so disaffected even though I'm from Wyckoff, NJ" and on and on. There's all kindsa pretension in the arts. It's just that some is more fun than others!
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Paula - 2004-01-29 18:43:03
SU, you forgot to put "[/i]" and now the entire WORLD is italicized!
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so SU me - 2004-01-29 19:59:25
Yeah, but at least that means we'll all be wearing nicer footwear.
(And hey - I would've corrected it but They Won't Let Me. Waaaah!)
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amattina - 2004-02-02 12:33:36
to the Supernatural Uneasethetist:
"note that there ain't no such thing as sincerity once a recording happens (unless, perhaps, it's a live-in-studio recording of a newly composed song done for the first time: everything else is performance)"
That's so sad you should feel this way..
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SU - 2004-02-11 10:21:40
Re amattina's remark: I don't mean there's no such thing as sincerity period; I mean that in a recording situation, that sincerity is inevitably mediated by the situation. (That shouldn't be taken as the same thing as *insincerity*!) That's why my parenthetical comment: I think a lot of people want to imagine the singer pouring out his/her soul, and while that can be the case, more often what you're hearing is the singer's skill in creating that impression, no matter how heartfelt the sentiments - simply because, dammit, it's take 37 and there's still that guitar part to fix, so we've gotta get this vocal down. Neither the intimacy of the composing situation nor the shared intimacy of the performance situation are present at that point.
None of that should get in the way of a song communicating genuine emotion, either from the writer and/or performer or on the part of the listener.
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Joe - 2004-02-12 02:22:44
Hey Paula!
Glad to hear you're enjoying THE LAMB. I think SELLING ENGLAND is a better record and A TRICK OF THE TAIL and WIND & WUTHERING top them both, but I've been a Genesis fan since '82. SU, the reason for that lovely conflation you mention is that the band had written enough music for 3 sides of the album when PG decided it would be a double. My faves are "Fly On A Windscreen", "Back In NYC", and "Silent Sorrow" - loves me some Mellotron.
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