...AND THEN THERE WERE THREE...

...musicians, two of them with some decent virtuosity on their instruments but limited talents as composers and too little progressive sensibility who were trying to create an album worthy to carry the name GENESIS after seven releases that where of high or just phenomenal quality. IMHO one has to emphasise on the word "trying" since this task was simply impossible to be managed after the demise of the two most important musicians. BUT I have to say as well all people rating this album below 3 stars are doing the mistake to compare ATTWT to the previous albums and I think that's not quite a fair comparison. Simply It just CAN'T have the same quality because the band is now COLLINS-BANKS-RUTHERFORD. Maybe they should have changed their name to "CBR", then there would't be that many discussions. So let's say ATTWT was "CBR's" admittedly quite decent and good debut and compared to any of their following releases (I think the only valid comparison) undoubtedly their best one. Sure it's not that much progressive (as my co-reviewer Proghead stated correctly, HACKETT was not there anymore to tell them), but I still regard it superior to Duke. Actually there is only one real dropper, their first world hit, but it's more or less just an "appendix" of the album and can be easily ignored.

I've got to admit that I like most of the songs but rather as a kind of background music because there is not any very special or outstanding one, the best and the one with the highest Prog potential being THE LADY LIES. Bass and drums are excellent, Tony Banks is introducing some new sound in his solo and even Phil Collins' vocs are excellent on here. Other fairly good ones are DOWN AND OUT (a little bit of reminiscence to "the good old days"), UNDERTOW (one of their nicest,but not too cheesy ballads) and SCENES FROM A NIGHT'S DREAM (good vocs and lyrics although being quite pop- ish). The worst after FOLLOW YOU FOLLOW ME is BALLAD OF BIG in my opinion and the rest are quite mediocre but not really bad rock songs or ballads, admittedly with a more dominating pop-ish character.

So finally how could ATTWT be rated as a Prog album? I would say it's still a rather good one of GENESIS (actually the last one that can be called such), but I'm hesitating to call it an essential one of, maybe only for fans of "CBR" which is officially not existing as a band's name. This is a site dedicated to Prog and we're speaking generally about the band called GENESIS and in this context I'd rather give it only 3 stars . Actuall the average of all ratings which is 3,5 probably reflects the fair value. Taking into account that two of the three musicians will become famous later on for their popular releases, ATTWT is within Prog still a decent album, that can be recommended not only to fans of "CBR" but as well to any lover of "light-prog" or Neoprog.

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