Genesis situation at the time of "The Lamb":
Gabriel: in a delirium of omnipotence, eager to shove lyrics into every crevice of the music created by his bandmates. Nevertheless, a great voice, a great singer.
Banks: in peak compositional form, focused on increasingly enhancing the synthesizers and especially recovering the piano to express himself.
Hackett: jaded, tired of being considered the newcomer and seeing his ideas sidelined. Not very willing to engage.
Rutherford: normal, calm, grappling with his bass distortion experiments.
Collins: still just the drummer. Plenty of good rhythms and some rhythmic ideas. His soulful, pop, melancholic tendencies are yet to come, with the marriage still holding strong.
What emerges is a conflicted work. The composed music is excellent for half the time, good for another quarter, and lacking for the last quarter. It could have been an excellent single album without the ballast of mediocre tracks and the New York concept cluttering everything with too many lyrics.
The excellent songs are "The Lamb," "Fly on the Windshield," "In the Cage," "Back in NYC," "Carpet Crawl," "Lilywhite Lilith," "Anyway," "The Lamia."
The sound, the production, are poor. A significant step back from "Selling England." Too much haste, too many frustrations. There are also glaring mixing errors.
But above all, Gabriel sings too much, overwhelms the album with his ramblings drowning out the beautiful instrumental ideas (except for those of Hackett, who leaves nothing memorable throughout the record).
Being a Genesis album, it is an excellent record. Containing wonderful songs, it is a must-have album. But had it followed the same structure as the previous "Selling" and the subsequent "Trick of the Tail," with seven or eight well-developed and balanced songs, it would have been an apotheosis.
Having records this substantial and inspiring, nonetheless.
