CALLING ALL STATIONS

Genesis fans are also very divided, or either you like the 70s or you like the 80s, very few in the middle. They were one of the rare cases of a band that went a completely different way from their initial phase and became huge, a succesful monster.

In 1991 thei released the last studio album with Phil Collins and 6 years later they decided to start again. New vocalist Ray Wilson was hired to fill the singing role while, as usual, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks provided the songs.

Now, granted, Calling All Stations is not a very bad record but it's not a very good record either. The problem with the album is that it's very average in everything. In therms of sound it's not all that different from the previous studio, We Can't Dance (that is very mediocre). Ray Wilson is not a bad singer but the problem is that he's either trying to sound sound like Phil Collins when Genesis is playing a 80's sounding track or he sounds like Peter Gabriel when the tracks ask for the 70's Genesis.

Songwriter wise the album is not very bad but we don't have any tracks that will stand out, it's just a mixed bag not very carefully thrown together. And that combined with the fact that everything sounds like or Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins makes it a bad record. Calling All Stations shouldn't have been released as a Genesis album it should have been released with another name on the cover. Same lineup but a different name could have given them more time to develope the whole project. Releasing it as a Genesis record has a shot in its own feet. So much so that not even the duo Rutherford/Banks mention this era. Differently from Ray Wilson that pretty much survive on Genesis music since then.

After all we have the worst possible thing for a record in Calling All Stations, which is: you're not very good and you're not very bad, you're just average. And average is the worst thing for any record ever released.

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