A TRICK OF THE TAIL

Trick is one of those albums that you could take a lot of perspectives toward. First, you could be thrilled that Genesis were continuing and just happy to have more. Conversely, you could forever be longing for the Gabriel days and just not terribly interested in whatever came next. Or, you could have been hoping that without Gabriel, the players would be able to really cut things loose and focus primarily on extraordinary instrumental work, as could be found in Selling England and Foxtrot.

I suppose I fall somewhere toward the latter option, as I certainly believe the Gabe's contributions were far from perfect, but I also enjoyed a good deal of the creative songwriting and instrumentation that were hallmarks of early Genesis.

Instead, in Trick of the Tail, we have the slow trend toward pop, with plenty of prog mixed in. I'd agree that some prog is better than no prog, but in my opinion, the prog content in Trick is much lessened than in their previous albums. The good news is that this still puts this album ahead of many other prog albums!

Highlights: Dance on a Volcano, Robbery, Assault and Battery, and Los Endos. Here, the prog is solid but not great, or consistent for that matter. There is plenty of experimentation in rhythm, such as the 13/8 flight of fancy in Robbery. In some ways, Los Endos eliminates the need for some of the other tracks, such as Squonk, because I would have preferred them to just rock out a bit longer on the closer than plod along for 6 minutes of Squonk.

The rest? It's all solid, but I find some of it somewhat dull (Entangled, Moon, Ripples), even with the nice 12-strings and spacey keys throughout.

So, A Trick of the Tail is good prog, and is also a good prog album (including a major plus for the album cover and sleeve), but is never great to my ears. I come back to it only rarely.