Tuesday, August 12, 2014

100 Greatest Prog Albums: #6 Foxtrot (Genesis)

 
Their fourth studio album and second with the "classic" lineup of Peter Gabriel (vocals), Tony Banks (keyboards and guitar), Mike Rutherford (bass and guitar), Steve Hackett (guitar), and Phil Collins (drums), Foxtrot is the second from Genesis to make the Top 10 in Prog Magazine's 100 Greatest.

Watcher Of The Skies is the first track on side one, a Sci-Fi song about an alien looking down on a deserted and dead Planet Earth. In an interview Tony Banks said, "Early one morning it was totally deserted. It was incredible. We had this idea of an alien coming down to the planet and seeing this world where there obviously there had once been life and yet there was not one human being to be seen." The Mellotron and organ opening? In a word, amazing.

 
The 3rd track, Get 'Em Out By Friday, uses reality and science fiction as social criticism of corporate greed and oppression of tenants by landlords in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s.
 
 
Most of side 2 is taken up by Supper's Ready, a nearly 23 minute long suite consisting of seven parts. I am at a loss to even to describe it. Except that it is EPIC. In a 1986 interview Peter Gabriel described it as "a personal journey which ends up walking through scenes from Revelation in the Bible . . . I'll leave it at that" (which may explain my inability to describe it lyrically - consider what Thomas Jefferson had to say about Revelation: " . . . I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences [sic]) of our own nightly dreams").
 
 
 
Simply put, Foxtrot is one of those albums that belongs in EVERY music collection.

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