LIVE - THE WAY WE WALK VOLUME TWO - THE LONGS

A limited edition companion to the first volume, featuring the longer works from their live show. Vintage material is an afterthought at this stage, relegated to an opening catch-all medley that spins through their catalog so quickly it may give some listeners aural indigestion. Clearly the band still has the chops to play the old tunes, regurgitating familiar chunks of "Dance on a Volcano" and "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", but for some reason they put things on spin cycle at the end, which only whets the appetite for a meal that never arrives. (A snippet of "Follow You, Follow Me" is tasty enough to make me wonder why GENESIS didn't draw anything from that album.)

The bulk of the music here is drawn from their last few releases, long in execution but not the sort of songs you'd light a candle for. "Driving The Last Spike" and "Fading Lights" are featured from "We Can't Dance", both sides of "Domino" from "Invisible Touch" (woo-huh?), and the band fuses the halves of the "Home By The Sea" series from their eponymous 1986 effort. As with the first volume, the live versions of the recent material are right on target. But the limited edition release reveals what Atlantic already knew: there's a limited audience for live versions of what to many originally constituted album filler. You can convince yourself that there's something of merit in this, even strain tiny pieces of gold from the atmospheric arrangements of their long-winded latter-day songs, but it'll soon find itself slipped back into the rack, its temporal power having waned to a faint glow after a few listens.

There are fans who will enjoy this -- presumably the same people whose delighted squeals usher in "Home By The Sea" -- but even they should be careful about spending too much for this now out-of-print disc. It is the least essential of the GENESIS live albums (including Volume One from this series), and they were a weak crop to begin with.