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Old 02-27-2023, 10:13 AM   #283 (permalink)
Trollheart
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Album title: Nursery Cryme
Artist: Genesis
Nationality: English
Label: Charisma
Chronology: Third
Grade: A
PA Rating: 4.41
Introduction: I love this album. Despite its few flaws, it’s Genesis at their height and shows how they have stepped out from the shadow of Jonathan King to produce their own, mostly never heard before sound, and set down some of the precepts of progressive rock itself. It casually gives the finger to radio airplay or the charts, daring, encouraging, luring people into buying the album. Which they, well, didn’t. It sold poorly and barely scraped into the top forty, but who cares about that? This is progressive rock, and if Trespass had shown that Genesis had arrived, Nursery Cryme showed they were still going places.

Tracklisting: The Musical Box/ For Absent Friends/ Return of the Giant Hogweed/ Seven Stones/ Harold the Barrel/ Harlequin/ The Fountain of Salmacis
Comments: One of my favourite early Genesis albums, I’d probably even put it up against Foxtrot, an album which shows the band at their creative best, with the album structured mostly around three major tracks, all weird flights of fantasy. Like all but three Genesis albums (okay, four if you count the final one, but I sort of don’t) there is no title track, but what could be called certainly the signature track, “The Musical Box”, which starts the album off, is the nursery cryme of the title, set in Victorian England and featuring a rather risque story of illicit love, magic and, well, evil. It’s a real adult fairy tale, and it’s not a suite but goes through various changes, so long that it could actually be considered a suite were it broken up, which it’s not. As in all the first few Genesis albums, it’s Peter Gabriel who has control over everything, his voice not always loud but always in command, and on “The Musical Box” he gets to let loose that manic side of him we see sometimes, as we did on “The Knife” and “Stagnation” on Trespass. It’s a powerful, well-constructed song featuring major work by Banks on the synths and with a massive punch at the end.

In contrast to this, “For Absent Friends” is a pastoral, simple little song about two people going to church and missing those who have passed on. You know, it’s all right but after the breath-taking bombast of “The Musical Box”, it’s a serious letdown. A real English countryside, home in time for tea song that really does nothing for me. Luckily it’s followed by another epic, the eight minute “Return of the Giant Hogweed”, which I initially took to be based on John Wyndham’s classic The Day of the Triffids, but have since been shown is actually based on real events. Well, sort of. It’s good fun and it builds up in a way similar to “White Mountain” off the previous album, with again a powerful, chaotic ending.

“Seven Stones” is a nice, if somewhat undecipherable song, with what sounds like orchestration but is of course all Banks, a nice flowing lyrical sort of melody and I think the first use on the album of flute. Genesis’s first song to use humour - if black humour - comes then in the shape (sorry) of “Harold the Barrel”, the darkly satirical tale of a man who goes on the run after upsetting his family and ends up, presumably, taking his own life. Collins shines on this, taking various roles, the whole thing playing out like some sort of comic act on stage. The final descending single piano notes convey the idea of Harold jumping very effectively. “Harlequin” then is a sort of ballad with a medieval flair and some really nice twelve-string, but kind of unremarkable when put up against the epics here. And speaking of those epics…

Feeding into their love of the classics, “The Fountain of Salmacis” takes as its subject an ancient Greek myth which resulted in the idea of hermaphrodites, the only people who literally can go fuck themselves. It comes in on a powerful crash of majestic synth, and goes through many changes over its eight-minute length, ending on a triumphant flourish that not only ends the song but the album, and bookends it really well with “The Musical Box”, essentially two fairy tales beginning and ending the album.

Favourite track(s): Everything bar “For Absent Friends”
Least favourite track(s): Let me think now…
Personal Rating: 5.0
Legacy Rating: 5.0
Final Rating: 5.0
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Last edited by Trollheart; 02-27-2023 at 10:19 AM.
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