CALLING ALL STATIONS

This album has no business with the Genesis name any more than "Rubber Riff" or "Land of Cockayne" has being Soft Machine albums! Ray Wilson is no Gabriel or Collins and it was stupid of him to sign up with the band in the first place. Ray wasn't even BORN when Genesis began. Yet if you look inside the booklet, there all three of them are, wearing sunglasses and looking like idiots. To add insult to injury, they have Mike and Tony in the back of the picture and Ray way up front.

Now about the music. Ray sounds like he's struggling to get the words out and the lyrics are just so AOR boring. Another problem is that Mike and Tony are stuck in the 80's with that wall of synth and drum machine sound. Mike's guitar sounds boring too--as if ANY generic 80's guitarist could play it. This is a 1997 recording guys. Get your heads out of the synth-pop 80's and try something else. THIS is one of the reasons the album didn't do anything here in America. Another reason was, by 1991, the final tour was sold as "Phil Collins AND Genesis." Getting some unknown like Ray Wilson was a stupid thing to do. Van Halen tried that with Gary Cherone and the "Van Halen 3" album. Look at what THAT album did. My point exactly--on the way to the cutout bins. Van Halen had David Lee Roth back in 1996 for two cuts but Eddie Van Halen screwed that up, didn't he? But I digress..

I read an interview with Ray Wilson and he said that Mike and Tony called him in 1998 and told him "We're not continuing because the market doesn't want us." Of course it doesn't want them. The music world has changed and they still live in the "synthesizer 80's"? That won't do anymore. So this is for hardcore fans only.