LIVE - THE WAY WE WALK VOLUME ONE - THE SHORTS

Since I received this disc as a gift, I'll give it the benefit of a review. Not that the review has to be rosy, of course! The relative who gifted this to me is definitely an appreciator of good--though perhaps not prog--music...a maven, if you will. I will take the positive assumption that by hooking me on the "shorts", this relative assumed I would venture further into the "longs". Hmmm...perhaps a bit optimistic, but I got to the longs anyway, and deep enough I might add that for a time I forgot the shorts existed!

I remember being in a record store at my local mall when these albums came out. I also remember thinking how cool these Genesis guys were portrayed to be. If you can't tell by now, I had a somewhat sheltered childhood. As it turns out, most people didn't think they were cool, but apparently there was a market for this stuff (ahem, the middle aged, I suspect), and thus the material was marketed.

I admit, there was a time that I did like some of this material. I thought Jesus He Knows Me was a clever, snarky take on the prototypical televangelist charlatan. For a sunday school boy, listening to this was sticking it to the man, unfortunately. I also did enjoy No Son of Mine. Heck, when I was in middle school and had those crappy Pocket Rockers, Invisible Touch was one of the singles I owned, and I thought it was great. How I also loved Focus and Pink Floyd at the same time completely escapes me now.

I'm rambling.

This was not a bad concert, and the recording is good. These are also not bad songs--all right, Mama might be bad--but they are not progressive songs. As such, it hurts the inner progger in all of us that this album even exists. However, I'll save my 1-stars for only those who truly deserve them. This deserves better, but only slightly.