NURSERY CRYME

One of the few Genesis albums I still had to review and one reason for this is that I've been in doubt for the rating for a long time now. The choice is between 3 and 4 stars once again. There's only one way to solve this problem and that's certainly not push it forward in time constantly. I will have to deal with it and that's by rating song by song and see what the average is.

The opener (Musical Box) is one of the first songs I got to know of this band and is the highlight and that will be no surprise. Always felt this is one of their very finest and I noticed almost every reviewer feels this way. Simply a case of 4,75 stars to me.

Second (For absent Friends) is a short and insignificant song and gets no more than 2 stars for the effort.

Third song and second epical one is a classic once again and one I have a soft spot for because it was on Genesis live and I always liked that entire album. Good symphonic composition. 4,25 stars.

Next in line is Seven Stones, a more than average song for Genesis standard with nice melodic inventions but not an outstanding song (3,5*).

Harold the Barrel is an up tempo fast and short track, accessible and nice but again no highlight (3,25*).

Harlequin is even slightly shorter but different in style, more of a ballad. Ok but less in quality to me (3*).

Fountain of Salmacis is the third longer song of this album and also the least of this trio. Still one of those songs Genesis is expert in, both in composing as in execution. But this one is a bit sloppy compared to most of their epics through the years (3,75*).

Ok, I'm not kidding here but it's exactly 3,5 on average but I will have to be fair: the longer tracks are the best and are strongly above this average and fill almost 2/3 of the timespace of this album. So I can only round this up to 4 stars but this is obviously not one of my very favourite Genesis albums.