My Review: Genesis - Foxtrot

 Genesis - Foxtrot 

In the time of the banality that repeats itself and whitens the oceanic, initial, nourished form of colours, there is no place for interest in a phenomenon, generational and social, that made water and air Siamese brothers, flying inside notes born to be absorbed and dilated, under a form that seemed a sterile exhibition of technique and a pastime to generate joy in those who formulated it and boredom in those who listened to it. Those gradations, magnified with psychedelia and post-psychedelia, were looking for the magic to be able to evolve, shifting the meaning of their existence, throwing themselves headlong into King Crimson's first and fundamental album. From there everything emerged, exploded, expanded to make progressive rock a true musical genre, but, having done that, it was only to begin a very broad discourse. In reality, an enormous fabric began to create a dense mass of content, satellites and sparks capable of giving the whole thing an inexplicable charm, aggregating millions of listeners to acid delusions devoid of drug-induced support.  Space had to be given to imagination, to culture, to a commitment that made consciousness an active part of a generous and unexpected exchange. The blues, and classical music joined the two stylistic aspects mentioned above, and out came a ‘progressive’ torrent of intuitions, ever fertile experiments capable of making music, in a photo book always willing to match mind and heart, in a walk that led to new horizons. It took courage, strength, a commitment and the conviction that one was already, from the start, on an abstruse, vertical path, a free descent into hell waiting for paradise to shorten the distance. The instinct changed, the meaning, the song became an outdated triviality, to be looked at without excitement, because what was being done went beyond the challenge: the masses usually reject those who pull themselves out of comfort, out of laziness, out of taking an instrument as the faithful companion that will give visibility and success. New ones also appeared, as new were the approaches while the sound was the spark that exerted the candour that popular music had lost decades ago. Music thus became a serious game in which intensity was to be measured and not merely skill. In this deliberate panorama, meaning had to be structured, with surprises, changes of direction and continuous flows of energy.

Approximation (remarkable what the mellotron did by calling up entire string sections without being one), devotion and intuition, gave a smooth back on which literature found hooks and a pair of skis on which to glide perfectly, urging the texts to open up perception and commitment. Fables became stories with morals to look for, uncomfortable characters, funny, but intent on making consciousness a victory and not a burden.  Every adventure that has within it kilos of eccentricity and passion shifts balances while offering doubts and certainties, which, blending together, favour different ways of reflecting, of stopping one's own time to enter, simultaneously, into others. 

Here it is, the crux of the matter: all that had preceded this new face was devoid of this intensity, of elaboration, it rejoiced in success by not grasping the possibility of giving music a dignity that had propensities and intentions more rooted in conceptuality and a different spiritual form.

Then came Genesis with this record, after an excellent warm-up lasting three albums with the fourth (by means of two grafts in the fundamental line-up) they threw the cards on the table on a September day in 1972 and everything became a sinuous orgy, a feverish support that flexed and became the nest to float in the new confines of the mental rooms.  The psyche enters mythology, into the blender that creates the vision and drama of pain to make it invincible, given the will to transform it, without opposition being able to prevent it, into a joyful smile that is understood at the end of the journey. Which is exactly what happened with Foxtrot, an imaginary educational book for broken minds, for realities without oxygen, for gloom that seems to have only one epilogue. But these long throws are the gymnasium of worlds waiting with open arms to release toxins and anxieties, to codify them, to catalogue them and, under a magic breath, to transform into a clearing where harmony returns.  The counterculture of the time was very different from the American counterculture: everything in these tracks highlights this gap and there is no need to make a choice. Genesis poses the pride of an outpost, one of many that are needed at that precise moment.

Thus, one finds oneself witnessing transformations, experiencing the pauses, the slowdowns, the accelerations, the developments of rhythmic metrics that sound like winds containing the wings of swiftly moving eagles, without having the breath of a lucidity that would make one understand what is happening.

Six patrols, fans, thunderstorms, gas trails, animal species that casually change, with voices further driving the stunner.  Foxtrot, step by step, lays its rib cage over our lungs and transforms the breath into a powerful cognitive flow where enchantment cheers, stuns with the right limit, giving steam the chance to become a blanket that protects the listening. The scenarios lead the eyes to see imagination as a festival of opportunities, where digression is a merit and not a limitation: it is important to gather information and strip it of trivialities and introduce a new way of centralising concentration. Refrains, for example, are almost a joke, a near-uselessness that is only used when one has given them a different face.  But what about the theatricality of the ensemble, which takes considerable risks, forever shattering the historical mode of its impressiveness? Music that has an immense, absolute script, that changes scenery, even before ending up on the stage of their incredible concerts for the promotional tour: everything was already waxwork, backstage, walkways of characters with stories painted on their faces accelerated by the orgiastic feeling of invulnerability. Words and sounds that, like Trojan horses, bizarre and impenetrable matryoshkas, for a long journey that makes shock and embarrassment the reins to make the listener helpless and enthusiastic, enter the creative file without embarrassment.  It is rock without inflection, clinging like a breath yearning to travel through history, to sustain long jams never in a state of stupid digression but purely undulating, and the desire to conceptualise themes of earthly history, where power, religion and freedom of expression are pressurised into absolute and vigorous exercises in inchoate. All this in order to specify everything in rays of sunshine to be seen while the notes and words seem like a long dragon incapable of hurting, but rather showing the monstrosity that approaches the listener to show him the way where the ‘truth’ sign is displayed. Music that floats like a gaseous particle that never explodes, but swells to keep our breath free of precipitation.  Apocalyptic (one only has to look at the last shining track to see how meticulously the Old Testament chapter has been plumbed), analytical (fate being observed, criticised, suggested as an outpost of human understanding), acoustic (several shimmering sound expressions, in this context, show how the previous Nursery Crime did not have this decisive peculiarity) and attentive to production (here an equal example of greatness without smearing), it allows the perception of a complexity that can be challenging for those without a precise education in variety. A challenge met by having unquestionable and generous qualities in its bosom.  When one has the ardour to unite rock, progressive and symphonic music, the path can only be one of good taste, of the subtle propensity not to prefer anything, but to favour a cohabitation that is available to those who struggle to access one of its parts. 

The melody on the album is a nuclear reactor: dangerous but useful for warming up the muscles of the mind and making the filters that made all this possible cohesive. We become angels, demons, prophets, humble silent souls and bewildered beings in the long traverse of time that builds a painting that melts fear and turns it into boasting.  The calmness, aggressiveness, rhythm changes, pauses, Pindaric flights and seasoning of the chord progressions are a continuous up and down that creates amazement and ultimately unquestionable fidelity. There are solos for each instrument (powerful, majestic and obvious), but never players of wasted effervescence: the order given is to enhance, specify and make this ensemble adjacent to sense. Steve Hackett's baroque guitar playing in Horizons is emblematic. Tony Banks' in Supper's Ready is a fat cloud shifting the balance of the sky. Throughout the album, Michael Rutherford seems like a gendarme controlling and giving orders with pride and precision, acting as the perfect glue for the genres expressed.   Phil Collins raises the impact of rhythm with imagination, without renouncing strength, with a work that is perfectly in tune with the compositions. Peter Gabriel, in resounding form, specifies the term genius between vocal interpretations, singing, lyrics that like vagabonds bring together an infinite whole and the use of four devices played with grace and perfect timing.  In the more than century-old dance of the Foxtrot, with long spans and the possibility of elevating its dynamic concepts, we find a handover with this Genesis soundscape, and specifically the instrumental parts, while demanding in extension and force of impact, never keep the vocal part waiting: a further, voluptuous quality that suggests how the union of the two entities has been studied and specified. There is no jealousy or prevarication, but a long perimeter within which what lives is filled with wine of multiple flavours.    It is a work that allows us to see new mental and physical lands conquered, with the ability to modify, where selfishness and a sense of freedom demand it, in order to forward, with artistic fury, the necessity of not giving the acceptance of human history its evil sneer (a glaring example is the new Jerusalem we find in As Sure as Eggs Is Eggs, the last part of Supper's Ready), ending up by giving the listener an unexpected sceptre, a remote control of the senses that makes the skin of the soul shine.  Inspiration, which plays a dominant role, is multifaceted, able to be a beacon, a wave that transports, that allows intuition as an analytical work to give it a way of not living in isolation. Here, current events, history, attention to the social aspect of living, the space to be given to dreams, are precise allies, united and in excellent harmony to make this wind an unexpected caress.

The great fluidity is an impressive, unmanageable astonishment: it sounds like a summary of what has always lived in the musicians' potential. Genesis know how to bring it up to date and with great manoeuvres make listening an act of endless benefit and gratitude, because in the gentle tide of these imposing waves such an element would be the last to be desired. Panta rhei, then, to truly allow access to transformation, to identity in progression, where time is only allowed to witness this great capacity.   There is no shortage of obscurity, the elusive and the incomprehensible, science fiction (epochal the magnetic Get ‘Em Out By Friday), the great lyrical “Englishness” of Peter Gabriel, absolute standard-bearer of both conservative and progressive modes, ending up being an incredible master who knows how to unite differences and ferocious shrillness.

The music is like Gabriel's singing: capable of being elegant and polite whispers, as well as respectful tears that become thunder-friends without ever having to shout and defy sound, in an almost perverse comatose state where much is allowed, and what cannot be done does not become a failing. This is another amazing quality of Foxtrot.  

Watcher of the Skies, a song born in Naples and featuring the inspirational whisper of Arthur C. Clarke, establishes the sound of Genesis, the fury tamed but still able to puff and hint at a bursting sacredness through the use of the Mellotron. Then everything widens, develops and turns into a lucid rush into madness.

Time Table presents the passage of time, inevitable, with a classic beginning (how much Procol Harum presence can be felt, but that's not a flaw...), conferred by a tinkling of piano keys and then hosting a fluorescent ballad-like track.  

Get ‘Em Out By Friday highlights the elegant exuberance, solos and rhythmic shifts that allow the whole band to be painters and create a canvas programmed to welcome. A minimalist suite, a hand offered to the homeless and a vigorous slap in the face of power.

Can-Utility and the Coastliners offers the acoustic expressiveness and progression of instrumental entrances that from the baroque and with hints of the Middle Ages delicately jumps into the contemporary.

The vinyl is turned over and the B-side begins with Horizons, the classical manifesto of a revisitation of Bach, that poignant harmonic parenthesis entitled Suite for solo cello BWV 1007, performed by Steve Hachett, to give imaginary poetry a drop of salt in the eye.  The last composition made the band enter legend without possibility of denial: Supper's Ready is a miracle, a multiple mantra, divided into sections, that never tires, a continuous generator of light and shadow, of spaces occupied with mastery, bringing together mysticism and religion, in seven acts amalgamated and fixed with the glue of eternity. All in the name of an evident intimacy, of a study that allows suggestions and imagination to expand the writing to determine it in a controlled chaos where what specifies it is an infinity never to be possessed, precisely because of its conspicuous capacity for escape.  The more one distances oneself, temporally speaking, from the moment when this legendary, insane, majestic masterpiece was composed, the more one realises the responsibility we have in not neglecting it, the duty to study it again and to be lucid witnesses of how music has lost this epicness, this magnetic extension, this delirium that can only be celebrated and incensed at, in copious doses. The risk is emptiness and bewilderment, but listening remains, capable of exercising memory and benefit.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

25th July 2024