FOXTROT

Inserting itself stylistically as well as chronologically between "Nursery Cryme" and "Selling England By the Pound", "Foxtrot" is in many ways the idealized transitional album that combines the pick of what came before with the pearls to come. The production is dramatically improved, Peter Gabriel's voice hits the sweet spot in dominance and subservience as needed, and the band is as unified as the Gabriel era could have allowed. Almost.

Side 1 of the original vinyl is 24 karat fulfillment. The majesty of their own mellodramatic "2001 Space Odyssey"-like intro to the equally dazzling "Watcher of the Skies" approaches or eclipses the epic zenith of "Musical Box" depending on your predilections. It certainly excavates and entombs any argument that prog rock packs less oomph than the good old boy rock of its day. After all this pomp, the medieval fantasy of "Time Table" is most welcome, and lights a path that the group could have followed successfully . But like a gifted athlete who happened to choose sport A but could have gone with B-E, GENESIS could have, and largely did, tackle whatever style they set their minds to. The mini suite ""Get em Out by Friday", projects a sci fi dystopian future-is-now premise that would be engrossing even if the music was not as dramatic and diverse as it is. "Can Utility and the Coastliners" begins similarly to "Time Table" but a moving mellotron led and 12 string guitar buttressed interlude ushers in a more intricate movement. Oh yes, "Foxtrot" is uniformly glorious...almost.

To many the relative success of this outing lies on their view of "Supper's Ready", with the majority in agreement that it's a chef d'oeuvre on a grand scale and certainly at the summit of side long epics that even mainstream artists saw fit to pile atop by this time. My ballpark estimate is 90% of these admirably ambitious extravagances suffer major flaws that detract from full appreciation, and, of these, the most egregious is their failure to bind the disparate subsections into a whole, underscoring the tendency to synthesis when it comes to these opuses. This worked much better on the likes of "Tubular Bells", "Thick as Brick" and "Echoes" which manage to bridge the ideas more cleverly. Another shortcoming is the tendency to ramble on in order to exhaust the requisite quota of vinyl grooves, which probably explains why, in the heyday of this art form, there weren't many behemoths in the 12-15 minute range. Why stop there? Unfortunately, "Supper's Ready" suffers from both bugbears, Somewhere around minute 18 it seems like Tony's organ has well and truly wrested control and is only using his hands because it doesn't have a pair of its own. I daresay another dubious achievement is that of inspiring the even more agitated "Battle of Epping Forest". Finally, and I promise the prosecution will rest, this isn't some great Homerian or Wagnerian odyssey, and it's not a parody either. All that said, just as it's not an integrated whole, it's also not a decrepit wreckage either. I enjoy many or the chosen acts, just not how they chose to yield to one another.

I can't help feeling that Foxtrot would have been the stronger, and the more unified, if, at the 11th hour, the muscular equivalent of laryngitis has struck "Supper's Ready" and several of its understudies had been called upon to fill its monstrous dance shoes as only unselfish understudies can. Now where is my "copy" of "Twilight Alehouse"?