Genesis - "Nursery Cryme" (1971) - Atlantic Records
Hello Friends,
I first heard Nursery Cryme in its entirety about two years ago and wasn't terribly impressed. Sure, some of the Peter Gabriel wordplay and melodies seemed interesting but listening to it sort of felt like a homework assignment and I thought to myself, I'll get around to this later. Honestly, I figured it was something I just wasn't going to get.
Sometimes when it comes to listening to music the stuff has you singing along before the final chorus often seems great at first, but over time it may leave you feeling a little flat or slightly underwhelmed.
I guess one of the great things about Prog Rock is that once you get past all its weirdness, its virtuosity and and its bombastic nature is that, in general, good progressive rock will reward the patient listener. Something you might have heard and cringed at two years ago you're now drunkenly singing along to at high volumes on a Saturday night causing record skips with your high leg kicks and spilling beer all over your dog!
Its like a Eureka moment. That moment when everything clicks in and you get it. When the guitar solos don't seem so serpentine and the lyrics don't seem so fucking strange. This is pretty much what happened with Tiki T. and I when we pulled out Genesis's third record, Nursery Cryme this past Saturday night!
Things start out relatively quietly with the eleven-minute "The Musical Box" opening up the album. Some gentle guitars, keyboards & flute accompany Gabriel's high-pitched and particularly vulnerable-sounding vocals about a young Victorian boy's ghost being awoken by the sound of his old musical box ("play me my song, here it comes again.") The thing is its his sister who has woke up his spirit and she's the one who is responsible for the boy's death (she beheaded him with a croquet mallet... hence the inspiration for the album's cover art!) If that wasn't weird enough for you, the boy's conjured ghost is now horny as hell and he makes lustful advances at his sister ("I've been waiting here so long... Why don't you touch me? Touch Me? Touch Me Now? Now? Now?...") before the song builds to a fantastic guitar solo crescendo/climax and ends.
The pretty and quiet ballad "For Absent Friends" brings things the listener back down to Earth for the next two minutes. Nursery Cryme would be the first Genesis album with new drummer (and sometime vocalist) Phil Collins and guitarist Steve Hackett. "For Absent Friends" features some very melodic, Renaissance-ish type guitar-picking by Hackett with some very pastoral-sounding vocals by Collins singing about a couple of old widowers who walk to church in the cold to remember they're departed loved ones. Its something that sounds unusually sweet and harmonious-- almost like a Revolver-era McCartney tune-- but not necessarily out of place on the record.
This tranquility doesn't last long as Gabriel returns in his most manic state telling us the tale of "The Return of the Giant Hogweed". WTF? Actually, this is another song that grew on us. The song seems to literally be about a Giant Hogweed that some scientist brings to London's Royal Gardens from Russia and it takes over the landscape in apocalyptic fashion. "Still they're invincible, Still they're immune to all our herbicidal battering." Its funny because a lot of Genesis's Prog Rock counterparts (Yes, ELP, King Crimson) would be singing about something totally fantasy-based (Starship Troopers, Tarkuses & Larks Tongues in Aspic). Here, Gabriel & company, with their over-the-top theatrics may sound like they're from outer space but actually the lyrics and concepts behind the songs come off sounding very sincere, very naturalist, some may say childlike, others might say proletariat. Whatever, when it comes to songs about weeds (non-marijuana types) this one's right up there with Guided by Voices's "Weed King."
Side One is bookended by two Lewis Carroll-inspired epics. Side Two has four songs which tie in to the whole Nursery Cryme theme which seems to be stories that are closer in spirit to a Brothers Grimm fairy tale than anything by Mother Goose.
"I heard the old man tell his tale..." opens the awesome "Seven Stones" featuring Peter Gabriel at his most delicate & sincere in another cryptic song about a ship lost at sea, perhaps? Maybe there's a "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" thing going on here? There's also some fantastic Mellotron playing by Tony Banks, which reminds us of something that might have been done by early King Crimson.
On the three-minute, uptempo, "Harold the Barrel", Gabriel's vocal acrobatics are on full display in a song seemingly about a restaurant owner who's about to jump off a ledge! ("You must be joking! Take a running jump!"). A song like this wouldn't be completely out of place on Abbey Road.
Also clocking in at under three minutes, the delicate & pastoral "Harlequin" sounds as if Peter Gabriel is doing his best Jon Anderson impression. Actually, with the quiet guitar lines noodling throughout and the harmonizing vocals, you could probably fool your friends and tell them this is some sort of Crosby, Stills & Nash outtake!
Things return to a more epic scale on the album's closer, the eight minute, "The Fountain of Salmacis" about a mythical Hermaprodite-- a creature containing both Male & Female sex organs! SWEET! Just when you thought these cats couldn't get any weirder!!
"Both have given everything they had.
A lover's dream had been fulfilled at last,
Forever still beneath the lake..."
A perfect, weird and proggy ending to this almost perfect, weird & proggy album*!
RATING: 4.5 Dense Forests of Tall Dark Pinewood out of 5
* Jamie Lee Curtis would probably agree!
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