A TRICK OF THE TAIL

This album is the first one in the Genesis canon that I happened to listen to. While it's not that bad of an album, I've heard some better efforts from them with Peter Gabriel in their line-up. Not that A TRICK OF THE TAIL is horrible by any means, but the whole of the album sounds too ''pretty'' for my liking.

Take the title track; it has that immediate infectiousness of any delicate art-pop song, but either I played it too much or it's overbearing prettiness got to me and I really can't listen to that song with the same scope as most proggers. This album sounds like the end result of a serious band trying to merge art and pop into one package of which the end result sounds flat out boring to my ears.

Only certain songs can please me at certain times and there isn't a reason why I prefer some songs to others. Take ''Entangled'' and ''Ripples...''; both are very long, very quiet acoustic numbers that are meant to be very pretty, but it so happens that ''Ripples...'' does nothing but bore me while ''Entangled'' can keep my interest for a while.

For the most part, there's not much life being pumped into the band here, other than Mike's bass which is astounding. ''Robbery, Assault and Battery'' and ''Los Endos'' are the least boring of the batch, and I like ''Entangled'' very much, but it's too sleepy, serious and pretty for me to really take to heart. It's missing that bite that Peter Gabriel possessed on their earlier classics.