Genesis
The Lamb lies down on Broadway

Much has already been said and written about the double album that marked the end of the relationship between Peter Gabriel and Genesis. "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" is one of the great albums of the seventies, celebrated by some as a myth, considered by others as a pretentious and unfinished work. Many have reviewed it over the years in a more competent and thorough way than I could ever claim to do. For this reason, I would like to focus on a couple of aspects that, in my opinion, have never been sufficiently highlighted.

One of the less considered aspects, in my opinion, is the fact that "The Lamb..." is in all respects the first, and let me say the only, album of (real) songs by Genesis/Gabriel Era, leaving aside the paltry debut of "From Genesis to Revelation". The songs on The Lamb are surely the best Genesis ever wrote in the binomial format of verse and refrain. And I'm not just referring to the famous "The Carpet Crawlers", "Counting Out Time", or "The Lamb Lies Down" itself. But I'm thinking of a potential single like "Anyway", the absolute beauty of "The Lamia", and the winning progression of a piece like "It" that anticipates all the Genesis to come. Yes, I reiterate that the songs are extraordinary compared to the past, where the atmospheres were certainly fantastic, the long musical suites, and the instrumental phrases rich in pathos. Here we are on a completely different level though. The band's progressive matrix is consciously lost in a contamination of styles more akin to traditional rock, and it comes out enriched and renewed. I think of the superb "Lilywhite Lilith" and its resemblance to Zeppelin's "Kashmir" for example... And it is precisely this shift in horizon that makes "The Lamb..." a more courageous and less partial album than its predecessors. All this despite a backstory that is, in my opinion, too complicated. A purely "Gabrielian" gamble imposed on the band, a project that suffers from a rather weak concept and occasionally forced poetics. Paradoxically, the recovery of certain musical synthesis, on one hand, gives us back Genesis as a group akin to the great rock of the seventies, on the other hand, it ends up clashing with a certain verbosity that weighs down the lyrics, starting with the song titles themselves.

The final effect is that of an album full of promises and musical cues, the sum of 5 years of wonderful music thought out and performed in a unique and original way, but probably not as accomplished as other musts of those times were. I think of "Tommy" by the Who or even "The Wall" by Floyd a few years later. Therefore, I have many doubts about whether the album is an absolute masterpiece. Perhaps the album's gestation by "separates in the house", Gabriel on one side and the guys in the studio on the other, perhaps Gabriel's own stubbornness in spectacularizing a subject that is ultimately his "great mental pipe". This fuels the opinion of those who claim that the album lacks the breath of a masterpiece but rather the stylistic heterogeneity of a transitional work more than a final arrival. We will never know what the immense effort of "The Lamb..." could have spawned, there were no subsequent episodes. Certainly, the band's unity was irreparably undermined. We must make do with the excellent but (stylistically) irreconcilable subsequent tests of solo Gabriel and the band of "A Trick of the Tail"; the former in search of his real stylistic signature as a great interpreter, the latter to reclaim the scepter of the best progressive band of the century.

What should be acknowledged about "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" is the clamorous originality of the project that takes shape just a year after the spectacular but much more canonical "Selling England by the Sound". And for this, we must credit Gabriel's visionary courage. What other band, having just achieved planetary success after years of apprenticeship, would have had the strength and audacity to turn the page? In "The Lamb" no discounts are made, nor are compromises sought with the solid foundations created by now-celebrated albums like "Foxtrot" or "Selling England...". Here the reassuring pastel shades are ungratefully replaced by an uncomfortable black and white. Fairy tales and elves are ridiculed, and it is a dark urban environment the context in which all the new compositions take place. Even the same renunciation of the strongly evocative scenarios of the past, because of a claustrophobic descent into underground New York, turns out to be almost provocative. In this contextual disorientation, it is Banks and Rutherford who, despite themselves, push the continuing line with the past, managing to create a sort of transition process towards the new sounds. Between the proto-punk of "Back in New York City" and an unexpected pop song like "Counting Out Time", there's still always a "Hairless Heart" that serves as a reassuring bridge. And if the intro of "Colony of Slippermen" seems to come out of "Before & After Science" by Eno, the subsequent keyboard attack brings it all home, almost as if we were talking about the sequel to "Harold the Barrel". That is the very picture of the album. On the one hand, there is Gabriel who forces the leap forward of the songs, towards more current sounds and scenarios, which New Wave first and Post Punk later will appropriate in different forms. On the other, a band not yet ready for the leap itself, thus inevitably anchored to its stylistic certainties. Also for this reason, "The Lamb..." does not take off as it perhaps could have if the band's vision had been more solid and unified. But it's a hypothesis, a rather simplified reading of what it was.

The rest is subject matter for forum debates, between fans of the purest hard progressive and those who already see the experiments of solo Gabriel as an escape route from a certain stylistic impasse. And both are right, because if on one hand the music was destined to change significantly at the end of the decade and Peter Gabriel will be a factual witness to it, on the other hand, Genesis will re-find the creative vein to put together other great albums like "A Trick of the Tail" and "Wind & Wuthering", before sinking into predictable pop chart material. Like it or not, "The Lamb" remains the testament of a great band that either unfortunately or fortunately will never be the same again, even if it will live off the memory of this grandeur for decades. It is an epochal album, at times difficult and controversial, yet unique and unattained, certainly the worthy epilogue of an unrepeatable story.