THE LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY

if you discount From Genesis to R the next 4 studio albums + the 1973 Live are made of such tunes and lyrics that it is hard to think of higher-level pieces from that golden era of Prog; they are imbued with deep connection with the land these guys came from; they are Albion pieces deep in the ground/soul/heart of the English isles.

For years I have been trying to work out what comes to a stop in LLDOB; it feels as if the magic that was there in the first 4/5 simply is not so strong anymore; we know Peter G left after this one; the vibration was fading .... and then they became an MOR money machine led by a man I loved as a drummer but well the least said the better :]

So i put it on my phone in hidef lossless and went to sit on s bench in the sun; now then why does it not connect as well as the earlier opuses? Please Music Gods let me know ....

And fairly quickly (do not get me wrong Carpet Crawl and Back in... are still awesome and will rate the album 4/5) I got it; i finally got it; it is the subject matter; these were 4 Old Carthusians (from Charterhouse private expensive school) plus the publican's son on drums well versed in Victorian lore deeply steeped in Englishness and Englishness only for the first time; probably due to their international fame and trips to the US; suddenly decide to write about a Puerto-Rican kid in NYC as if this was natural to them...

Well it was not and it never rings TRUE. That to me is the "mistake" here. They went unto territory they did not possess or inhabit enough; plus they went for a double when it should prob have been a decent single album ... too ambitious too lengthy too diluted and lost in a strange land .... losing the listener in the process

A writer must write about what he/she knows and there Peter strayed away from Albion; arguably the other guy who was/is even more connected to that land was/is Mike Oldfield especially in his case West England in summertime; but Genesis was also a hugely brilliant articulator of all the strands that make up the Island they hail from .... so that is it i finally feel happy to be able to see why it was not as much of a total knockout as their earlier pieces .... still more than OK tho obviously