WE CAN'T DANCE

This album is in my collection for a mix of nostalgic reasons (it was an album played a lot during my childhood) and for the closing track Fading Lights, and its extended instrumental section which I love. Some of the other tracks on the album are good too (Dreaming While You Sleep sticks in my memory, while Driving The Last Spike is an epic that sometimes captures me and sometimes not) but it is undeniably a less progressive, more one-dimensional and commercial album than the original Genesis would have contemplated releasing.

Of special note, Phil Collins is still a great drummer and there's some nice playing on here, albeit in a more straightforward vein. Sometimes I find myself tuning out the rest and just listening to that.

All in all there are tracks I skip and tracks I look forward to, and tracks that in the right mood are good once you get past the idea that the band play a different style to what they did in the seventies.

And yet, with tracks like Fading Lights I can't shake the feeling that if you took the highlights from the last three albums they produced and weaved them together cohesively on a single album, it could have been a release for progressive rock lovers to celebrate.