Nursery Cryme (1971)

Artist: Genesis
Release Year: 1971

Rating: 7/10

Track Listing: 1) The Musical Box; 2) For Absent Friends; 3) The Return of the Giant Hogweed; 4) Seven Stones; 5) Harold the Barrel; 6) Harlequin; 7) The Fountain of Salmacis.

Here we arrive at what most would call the "classic period" of Genesis: Phil Collins and Steve Hackett are aboard, the boring passages of old are mostly discarded, and the band moves firmly into prog territory.  Although the balance would be tenuous enough to fall apart in a few short years, this is where the good decidedly outshines the bad...as long as you can follow along with all the whiplash-inducing changes between one beautiful section and another, of course.  

The opening song "The Musical Box" is outstanding throughout, right from the timeless harpsichord intro to every other segment of pleading, sighing, crooning, and shouting Gabriel carries us through.  It takes a bit too long to build up to the wicked middle section, but that's a minor complaint when Hackett rips in with that solo.  And the ending, with the desperate "touch me, now, NOW, NOO-OOOWWW!" is electrifying.  This song is everything great about early Genesis.  Then there's the stomping, jagged "Giant Hogweed", which mostly succeeds in making a plant sound terrifying, at least when the band isn't leaning on their very English absurdism.  But the flute and guitar solos are tasteful and fun without bogging these eight minutes down, and Phil Collins' drumming is outstanding.

I do like the morose, dreamy "Seven Stones", as well as the hymn-like "For Absent Friends" and the slightly inferior "Harlequin", which are both pretty, but not stellar.  "Harold the Barrel" is supposed to be a joke, but it just sounds dumb, and I don't care how much of a party pooper that makes me.  

The album is probably summed up the best by "The Fountain of Salmacis", though.  The opening is irresistible, with the sweeping, majestic (Mellotron) strings, a moment to which we return multiple times throughout the song, as if stepping back in awe each time.  As usual, though, my favorite element is Steve Hackett's weeping guitar, and I only wish he'd been given more to do until the frantic middle section.  The story is another ripoff of Greek mythology, go figure-- sorry, I have no patience for religious retellings in any format.  At least this song feels a little more coherent than the ones that came before, even if the falsetto vocal sections sound a bit like a bored child's off-the-cuff musical hallucinations.  But the whole thing is just too cinematic for me to ignore.

So, why only a seven?  Well, the album has a certain unstable quality to it, like it's being played and sung sideways in a funhouse mirror, and with most of the songs sounding like they want to resolve somewhere but never really managing it.  The chord changes, the start-and-stop moments, the melodic turns and changes of mood and motif-- they all seem so drastic and aren't always connected well, and that makes it hard for me to remember all of it.  With more coherent structure, this could have been a truly great album, but as it is I cannot rank it above "consistently interesting" and "very good".  It has been growing on me, though.