WIND & WUTHERING

I'll make this a short review because I am tired from the Foxtrot review I just wrote. This is one of those albums that I can say has some great music, but for some reason I just don't find myself loading this one onto the CD player too often. There are a couple of great tracks here, some mediocre ones, and one that just plane sucks. Your Own Special Way is I guess not terrible in terms of musicianship or melody, but it just doesn't fit in the context of the album or with Genesis up to this point in their career for that matter. The two best tracks are the first two, with One For The Vine being the better one. One For The Vine has some excellent musical moments that one can tell were all Hackett's doing (listen for the similarities between this and Spectral Mornings). Wot Gorilla? is actually a really cool intrumental track that has a great beat thanks to Collins; it's short and sweet.

Very quickly, All in a Mouse's Night weaves an interesting tale (no pun intended) about a cat and mouse; this is a good track. Blood on the Rooftops starts out with such a great acoustic guitar solo from Hackett that is reminescent of Horizons but beyond this the song falls flat in my opinion. The last three tracks work together as one long track, but overall this one doesn't impress me. I don't really see the connnection between the music and Wuthering Heights. The music is good, but the melodies fail to captivate.

A couple of other qualms: Gabriel's singing beats Collin's any day, Gabriel's lyrics are better, Gabriel's flute is sorely missed, and you get the feeling that if Hackett weren't involved with this one, it would have been a dismal failure. I would say that if you have many of Genesis' other albums then you probably won't regret getting this one.