| Track: | Rating: | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. No Son Of Mine | | | | | |
| 2. Jesus He Knows Me | | | |||
| 3. Driving The Last Spike | | | | | |
| 4. I Can't Dance | | | |||
| 5. Never A Time | | | |||
| 6. Dreaming While You Sleep | | | | | |
| 7. Tell Me Why | | | |||
| 8. Living Forever | | | | ||
| 9. Hold On My Heart | | | |||
| 10. Way Of The World | | | | ||
| 11. Since I Lost You | | | |||
| 12. Fading Lights | | | | ||
All songs written by Genesis.
As of this writing, the only other Genesis album for which a Tentative Review has been written is The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Until the next such review, then, these will be the only reviews to be listed under the Genesis category. Which means that both the best and worst Genesis studio albums will be covered.
We Can't Dance is the work of a band hurtling headfirst towards the far tip of their nadir. It made a lot of money for those concerned, but also degraded the Genesis name to levels previously unfathomed. Many fans of the early material would argue that the band lost their integrity after Wind & Wuthering, and stopped even trying to recapture their former greatness after Duke. Perhaps. But it isn't until WCD that the full extent of their talent deterioration becomes crystal clear.
It would be foolish to suggest that this further decline is unrelated to events in the solo career of Phil Collins. Between 1986 and 1991, Collins scored a #1 hit with his worst single ever, "A Groovy Kind Of Love". His But Seriously album, a more bland creation than even his earlier works, had yielded numerous hits for him. In other words, PC was becoming progressively duller, and was experiencing no resistance from the commercial market in so doing. With his role as a songwriter for Genesis on the rise as well -- partly due to Banks's diminished writing presence -- the damage couldn't help but carry over. (And, as long as we're on this topic, Mike Rutherford's success on the adult contemporary charts didn't exactly bode well for this project either).
This album became something of a monstrosity in 1992, spawning several tedious and idiotic singles that made it almost impossible for fans of progressive music to retain any reasonable level of tolerance for the outfit. Despite having a few good songs here and there, the album mostly serves to prove that the image of "Genesis the pop-hitmakers" was an accurate one for the time in question. And although Phil is most deserving of the blame, neither MR nor TB can be totally excused either.
Somewhat surprisingly, the debut single from this album actually wasn't that bad of a number. "No Son Of Mine" may be overly melodramatic in its sentiments and hackneyed in its lyrical theme, but it had enough substance to qualify as decent radio material for late 1991. The album version of the song, moreover, is rather more elaborate than the single -- the drum lead-in is actually fairly clever, the lush keyboard atmospherics work fairly well, and the droning guitar line actually provides somewhat of a disjointed effect for the song. The weak point, of course, would be the actual lyrical content -- while the idea of a son running away from an abusive household is promising enough, lines like "Where should I go and what should I do" can't help but blunt the impact somewhat. The track ends with an extended fadeout, which actually works fairly well in context. The group obviously put a bit of time into this number, and deserve some credit accordingly. So far, so good.
And for this we suddenly sink to "Jesus He Knows Me", a belated televangelist parody that bears a vague similarity to "Don't Lose That Number" from a musical standpoint. This song was simply a bad idea from the outset, suffering from inane lyrics and unspectacular music; the fact that they were taking on the easiest target in the world of popular media doesn't really help their cause either, in retrospect. The reggae section is particularly painful. An instrumental version would have been better, though probably not by much.
Things improve again with "Driving The Last Spike", an improbable ballad devoted to the miners who sacrificed their lives in the railroad expansion of the late nineteenth century. Phil sings from the naive perspective of one such individual; the limitations of the character seem to fit his style of writing fairly smoothly. The slow, somewhat touching introduction (where the miners wave goodbye to their families over a keyboard line that sounds a bit like "In The Glow Of The Night") leads to some impressive singing and instrumentation in the "mining disaster" section, turning them to the "anthemic pop" (though still not terribly bad) nature of the final section. It doesn't add up to quite as much as it could have, but it's a noble effort at trying something new. And it's certainly better than what follows.
To understand completely the extent to which "I Can't Dance" turned Genesis into musical laughingstocks, it would be necessary to have experienced the absurd level of airplay which the song received on commercial radio in the early months of 1992. The song was also used as the "focal point" of their summer arena tour, and provided the titles for the two live albums which resulted (even now, the revamped Genesis still does the song as an encore). Relative to its influence, this is arguably the worst track of the group's career; beginning with a loboto-riff on guitar and featuring tragi-comically inane keyboard effects, the track was intended to function as a parody of fashion commercials, beer commercials and so forth. The only problem is that it isn't clever, and is as much self-parody as anything else. I'm thankful that free copies of the video weren't included with the album, by the way.
From the ridiculous to the sublimely banal. "Never A Time" is about as close to formula pop music as would be imaginable, possessing no real marks of distinction aside from a vague similarity to "Throwing It All Away" from the previous album. The few elements of Rutherford's previously distinctive style of writing push through on occasion, but the degenerated nature of said style in a rigid pop format brings to mind the wearing down of Urizen into an indistinctive form more than anything else. This track, too, comes close to being without merit.
Perhaps Bowler & Dray described "Dreaming While You Sleep" best by referring to it as "better than even the most ardent Genesis fan could have hoped for", though one hopes that they didn't intend this as a compliment to the group. This is easily the best number on the album, featuring a compelling keyboard-percussion pattern and a reasonably gripping narrative of a weary driver hitting a female pedestrian and refusing to mentally confront his actions, driving onwards into the darkness. Even granting that the lyric could have been a tad less prosaic, this is still a worthwhile number -- it may be the only track here which really fits into the "Genesis legacy" proper. Originality is a different matter, of course. The drum line at the end is directly inspired by "In The Air Tonight", the themes of the two songs are rather similar, and Phil sings the line "all of my life" throughout the last section of the song -- the reader should be able to make the connection. (Incidentally, I just realized in preparing this review that Rutherford briefly plays a guitar snippet from "Fly On A Windshield" in the middle of the track ... whether this counts as cleverness or simply poor taste may be left up to the reader).
The second half of the album is pretty much a single banal stretch from beginning to end, alleviated only by two instrumental spotlights from Banks. We begin with "Tell Me Why", a run-of-the-mill protest song -- ostensibly written for the Kurds after their persecution by Saddam Hussein in 1991, there is no actual indication of this in the lyric. Mediocre lyrics and music are in abundance, with a vague Phil-goes-Motown touch recurring again at times. The first chorus is vaguely interesting, having at least the value of a "hook", if nothing else. The rest is disposible.
"Living Forever" begins in a slightly better manner, featuring a bit of musical variety by way of a prominent snare brush presence. The actual song is fairly mediocre -- a half-inspired observation on dietary fads, utterly lacking in original sentiments as such; the music isn't terribly good either. As against this, however, the second half of the song is almost entirely devoted to a keyboard solo from Banks, instantly qualifying as the most musical moment on the entire release; even better, the "song" section doesn't reprise once the solo comes to an end. The song is worth two stars, the solo four; ergo, this rating balances out the conflicting features.
"Hold On My Heart" is another lull. Banks throughs in a few discordant notes, and Rutherford (amazingly) gets in a few seconds of Spanish/jazz-influenced guitar stylings, but the work as a whole is just another prosaic Phil-dominated ballad. The similarity of the lead off guitar line to both "The Living Years" and "Follow You Follow Me" is somewhat telling as well. Another number that's easily skipped.
"Way Of The World" at least takes the band back to a level of tolerable mediocrity. This average pop number (penned primarily by MR, apparently) features a vaguely interesting chorus hook and a half-decent keyboard solo; while not enough to make the track good, it counts for something in the relative nature of the album. The message of complacency in the face of social malaise is more than a bit questionable, but the lyrics are generally forgetable in any event. Not a disaster, but there isn't really any reason for this track to exist.
"Since I Lost You" was apparently written by Phil about the death of Eric Clapton's son, but the lyrics are vague (and banal) enough to refer to just about any situation of departure. The waltz-time effect is a decent change of pace, I suppose, and the echo effect on the drums isn't so bad. Phil's singing, moreover, is better than one might except; even more surprisingly, a lyric of substance filters through on occasion. For all this, though, the song just doesn't add up to much.
Many listeners regard "Fading Lights" as a swan song for the Collins-led era in Genesis history, so it seems appropriate that it doesn't quite make its potential. The instrumental section in the middle of this track was written with the obvious intent of echoing the group's older material, and some fans have consequently suggested that the track is an album highlight for doing this. Unfortunately, this isn't quite the case. Although superficially similar to previous Banks-driven solos, this may be the worst such passage in Genesis history: a few decent progressions here and there, but ultimately signifying very little. Banks is capable of more than this, and his half-developed performance here is truly a disappointment. As far as the next of the song goes ... well ... the theme of uninspired meetings and the gradual entropy of a partnership seems to fit well into an understanding of the group's position (if Tony wrote the lyrics, this may actually have been his intention), but it doesn't really add up to much either. Besides which, "and you know that these are the days of our lives" is not the sort of line that can be accepting without comment. This track is probably the fourth or fifth best work on the album, but it still falls well short of its potential.
Such is We Can't Dance. There really isn't any need for a progressive fan to buy this album. Perhaps a WCD EP, consisting of tracks 1, 3, 6 and 8 might have been a better idea from an artistic standpoint. Sadly, this doesn't seem to have been the primary motivation of the band at the time in any event.
This album serves to remind the fanbase that Calling All Stations, whatever its flaws, is at least a half-step in the right direction ... sort of.
(review originally posted to alt.music.yes on 11 April 1998)