WIND & WUTHERING

In 1977 Genesis released "Wind And Wuthering", a work that a lot of people tend to consider their last, truly, progressive album. The band song-writing approach keeps similar to the previous 1976 "A Trick Of The Tail", but surely suffers this comparison in terms of homogeneity. The opening track "Eleventh Earl Of Mar" is a quite convincing number that features powerful drumming and poderous bass line, and show the listener the path which the band sound was destined to follow, since it could have been contained, without any problem, in the "Duke" album. The following track "One For The Vine", could be considered the album masterpiece, a true progressive epic, that due to its inner complexity, various time and mood changes, took Tony Banks a year to be written; a song that later became a classic for Genesis live shows in the early 80's. "Wind and Wuthering" continues with "Your Own Special Way", a Mike Rutherford number that seems to owe a lot to "Entangled" from "A Trick Of The Tail", but not succeeding to reach its level, remaining a less interesting love song, an unusual format for Genesis, Song number four is the instrumental "Wot Gorilla?" nothing more, nothing less than a "link track", not even comparable with the instead awesome "Los Endos". Comparison with "A Trick Of The Tail" keeps on returning as a sort of curse, even with "All in A Mouse's Night" which if musically is great, lirically it sounds like a bad version of "Robbery, Assault and Battery" a quite silly fantasy tale. Talking about unusual formats, Genesis has never been a band famous for social contents, lirically speaking, and in those rare cases in which they dealt with them they used metaphorical language, like on "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight" from "Selling England By The Pound" a caustic attack to England consumerist approach to everyday life, a matter particularly felt by Peter Gabriel in those days. On "Wind and Wuthering" "Blood On The Rooftops" with its lines "The Arabs and the jews, too much for me" and other references to quotidianity takes the matter from a different point of view, thanks to a more direct language; also to mention interesting harmonic progression. Surely along with "One For The Vine" and "Afterglow" one of the best tracks on the album. Two other instrumental pieces follows : "Unqueit Slumbers For The Sleepers" and "...In That Quiet Earth" that opens up to the perfectly arranged "Afterglow" which features awesome choirs and beautiful organ sctions, not to mention beautiful lyrics: undoubtely one of their best song ever.

"Wind and Wuthering" in the end is not homogeneous as "A Trick Of The Tail", not a masterpiece, but surely a great addition to any prog collection.

My Rating is 4 stars.