THE FUGITIVE

My goodness, what a disappointment! After the classic "A Curious Feeling" we got this! I'm really trying to find out what Tony Banks tried to do with this album. It reminds me a lot of Mike Rutheford's forgettable Acting Very Strange. Yet I find The Fugitive even worse. It's a very weak album by any standard even if you (like me) like Genesis most commercial pop songs. Banks is surely a genius, a fantastic keyboards player and Genesis would never be what they were without him. His solo output may be erratic, but he always managed to put some great songs on them and to bring on some good vocal performances. That's exactly the problem here. No song on this album is really great, or even very good. Mediocre at best. Banks is no singer but he tries to, and most of the time his vocals are almost hidden behind a wall of effects, which do not help to bring some life to those lacklustre tracks. Fortunately mr. Banks never again would release such a bad disc, either solo or with Genesis. And some of his later efforts were very strong, like the brilliant Strictly Inc. If you're a Genesis fan, avoid at all costs.