...AND THEN THERE WERE THREE...

I find this album extremely hard to give a ´proper´review. I guess my feelings towards this album keep getting in the way since it was released. At the time it was out in the stores I though Genesis was finished. At least as the band I used to know and love so much. First, I could never really understand why they didn´t replace Steve Hackett. The lack of a real fine lead guitar is too obvious all the way through. Mike Rutheford may be a fine bass player and a more than average rhythm guitarrist, but clearly he is not a natural born solist. His solos are more tentative than thrilling (except maybe on Burning Rope). And he has nothing of Hackett´s or Philips elegance and fluidness, no matter how hard he tries. And it does not seem he was trying very hard...

The band was not in their most inspired phase either. Few songs are memorable and this is sure quite inferior to anything they had released before (including From Genesis to Revelation). There are of course some nice stuff: Many Too Many, Burning Rope are good examples of their great songwriting skills. Still, everything here sounds rather contrived and half baked. Although many progheads dislike the last track, the hit Follow You, Follow Me, I think it is an excellent prog pop song. At least it worked better as a whole than all of the other tunes on the album.

...And Then There Were Three... still remains a strange album in my collection. Not really bad, not really good. Transitional period, I guess. It´s unfair to compare it to Wind & Wuthering, but I still think it is inferior to Duke, for example. Definitely not for the newbies.

Final rating: something between 2 and 2,5 stars.