FOXTROT

To be honest, whilst I would be the first to admit that Foxtrot is a great album, over the passage of years I've found that I've ended up prizing Trespass, Nursery Cryme, and Selling England By the Pound above it. The album jettisons a certain amount of the gentle, pastoral approach of the past two albums (though there are quieter moments here and there) in favour of adding a bit more bombast and theatricality to the sound, with what I find to be mixed results; Get 'Em Out By Friday, in particular, I find I need to be in a particular mood to fully appreciate, though I've come to appreciate it more over time, whilst Supper's Ready has many undeniably wonderful qualities, but at the same time seems a bit calculated - like the band were going out of their way to produce a twenty minute epic simply because it was the done thing at the time, and it's pretty evident that none of these musical pieces were meant to go together until they crammed them together.

Still, I do like it more than, say The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, and it's overall a very, very fun album - I'm just one of those heretics who wouldn't put it at the absolute peak of the Genesis canon. That said, over time I've realised that it's still streets ahead of anything competing with it; truly, Genesis' run of albums from Trespass to Wind and Wuthering breaks the normal review scales, because you're basically comparing five star albums with other five star albums. Increasingly, I find that Genesis is the compass by which I navigate the world of prog, and Foxtrot is a key component of their canon.