Genesis
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway [50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition]
ATLANTIC/RHINO
Hotly anticipated as a re-release since Peter Gabriel turned in his flutes and capes for sledgehammer dance moves and WOMAD, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was Genesis’ final grand theatrical concept as schoolmate pals, Gabriel’s last stand as their frontman, and the group’s most focused and epic work. How overawing was The Lamb within Genesis’ catalog? When the then-there-were-three ensemble played their last tour in 2022, an ailing Phil Collins sounded hearty and haughtily dramatic when tackling the 1974 concept album’s title song. Likely this was due to the fact that Gabriel’s wiftiest existential tale of rage, escape, and dual consciousness fading into one vision was surrounded by unusually cool complexities in its arrangements and melodies big on broad contagion from Collins, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, and soon-to-be-leaving guitarist Steve Hackett.
Less rustically English and more urbanely American, this 50th anniversary edition of the record is given a bolder, brighter, shocking edginess in its remixed remastering. Sure, the luster of Banks’ bank of death-prog synthesizers and electric pianos are still in the mix, now rivaling Innervisions-era Stevie Wonder on the eerily soulful “The Carpet Crawlers”—an ambient doom groove that guitarist Hackett redoubles on tracks such as “The Waiting Room.” But where the newly redone album and a full Lamb-tour concert from LA’s Shrine Auditorium prove most impactful comes in the freshly fixed propulsion of the concept album’s rhythm section. If you forget for a second that platinum-plated pop-singing Collins was once prog’s jazziest, funkiest, muscular drummer, then the punkish feel of “Back in New York City” makes sense. The same is true of Rutherford’s bass tones on songs such as “Lilywhite Lilith”: they all but spook, then lift your heart rate and swell your Adam’s apple.
It would be easy to announce that Gabriel’s heightened theatricality—an operatic “Back in New York City,” the over-the-top mania of “The Colony of Slippermen,” the Headley Grange studio demo for “In the Cage”—is this deluxe package’s highlight, as it was upon the album’s original release. Yet the point of and success regarding this Broadway-bound Lamb at 50 is how every band member’s appropriation of Gabriel’s theme (Lamb is often referred to as his true first solo album) and each man’s exquisite, energetic individual musicality is what truly brought this concept to roost. Gabriel is still the Great Imperial Aerosol King. It just so happens that his lords of the court had just as much to say, if not more.
