NURSERY CRYME

Another album, another major change for GENESIS on their third release NURSERY CRYME, however this one was significant. This was the album that saw Phil Collins replacing John Mayhew on drums and likewise Steve Hackett replacing Anthony Philips due to his stage fright. As can be expected with 2/5 of the band having changed the guard, a new band sound also emerged. While "Trespass" was a very ethereal album with only one track really rocking out, NURSERY CRYME takes on the characteristics of a fully developed symphonic prog sound complete with acoustic guitar intros and plenty of contrast with more bombastic rock on some tracks. While this album was not very successful upon its release, it has become a major prog staple and deemed one of the best GENESIS albums. This is one of those albums that everyone else in the universe seems to love but for me personally i have never been able to get into it no matter how hard i try.

So just what's going on here for me to dislike one of the most classic and beloved prog albums of all time. Well, just about everything here seems off. While i absolutely love "Trespass," i just don't feel like GENESIS really got a consistent sound together with this lineup until "Selling England By The Pound." This album starts out beautifully with the gorgeousness called "The Musical Box," a Victorian fairy story about two children in a country house where a girl cleaves off a boy's head with a croquet mallet and ultimately gets her comeuppance when she discovers the boy's musical box which upon opening it is haunted by the boy's spirit and begins to age quickly. Cool dark stuff and all and after wondering why this song pleases much more than the rest of the album i found out that this tune was actually written as an instrumental called "F#" by Anthony Philips and simply adapted to the fairytale. This one works brilliantly for me but the rest of the album doesn't as much. So this is really the only track that i absolutely love.

I just can't stand the slower tracks like "For Absent Friends," "Seven Stones" and "Harlequin." The other tracks i do like are "The Return Of The Giant Hogweed and "The Fountain Of Salmacis." The remaining track "Harold The Barrel" is OK but really doesn't set my world on fire either. Overall, this is an unbalanced mix for me. The songs i really like are excellent but the rest just leave me feeling let down to varying degrees. While Peter Gabriel takes a more theatrical stance on this album and rock elements are more prevalent, it's really the songs themselves that seem lackluster. The lyrical content seems to be ok, but i can't connect with the musical compositions. While most of the time i can listen to an album enough and connect to it merely by hearing it from the band's point of view, on NURSERY CRYME i just keep finding certain elements irritating and wanting to change the chords and song structures. It doesn't help that the production is below brilliant but that isn't really an issue for me if the music itself is of a highly entertaining value. Sorry fans of this album. This is really one of the few prog classics that i dislike more every time i hear it save the few tracks that really do hit me the right way. Give me "Trespass" over this any day.