Victorian Gothic is the only way to describe Nursery Cryme, the first classic album by Genesis during the Peter Gabriel era.
Gabriel, before achieving his worldwide acclaim as a solo artist in later years, wrote his most morbid, melancholy and surreal songs as the leader of the seminal progressive rock band. Layers of twelve-string guitars and waves of keyboards added to a sound that veers from delicate to demonic.
Nursery Cryme includes songs about rapacious ghosts, man-eating plants and mythological hermaphrodites. The ghost in question is that of a boy, whose head
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was cleanly removed by a mallet during a croquet match with his female friend.
Adding to the live performances was Gabriel’s now legendary song introductions and costuming. The albums that followed included the apocalyptic Foxtrot, and the convoluted dark dream epic of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, in which a ne’er-do-well tagger named Rael is transported into a nightmarish, alternate reality. The pure musical genius of the band is matched by the black humor and clever wordplay of Gabriel's lyrics.
Forget the Genesis you think
you know, and enter a world
of gothic imagination. |
