"The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", Peter Gabriel's last album with Genesis, is a progressive rock classic, a (slightly padded) surrealist concept album telling the story of New York street punk Rael and his journeys in the underworld. Gabriel used to tell strange stories between songs while the guitarists changed tunings, and "The Lamb" was chosen to be extended into album length. This is one of those albums that at first listen has you going "what's so great about this?", but with repeated listenings, becomes a favorite. Genesis' playing isn't as showy as prog-rock peers like Yes and ELP (the only virtuoso musician is drummer Phil Collins) -- and as a result early Genesis takes a few listens to get accustomed to -- but the songs are just as original and musical.

The album ranges from great singles like the title cut and "The Carpet Crawlers" to the menacing "Back in N.Y.C." (which foreshadowed the rage of punk, but in 7/8 time), the teen-lust "Counting Out Time" (compare the lyric with Richard Thompson's "Read About Love", written 15 years later), a soulful "The Chamber of 32 Doors", and great instrumentals like "Fly on a Windshield", "Hairless Heart", and "Riding the Scree". "In the Cage" became a highlight of Genesis' live show for years to come. Steve Hackett contributes some nice guitar solos on "Fly on a Windshield", "The Supernatural Anaesthetist", and "The Lamia", while Tony Banks provides some of his best keyboard solos on "In the Cage", "The Colony of Slippermen", and "Riding the Scree". The band didn't really have enough material for a two-record set, and so the second half is padded with instrumental filler ("The Ravine", "Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats", the openings of "The Waiting Room" and "The Colony of Slipperman"). "Lilywhite Lilith" is a reworked excerpt from the early Genesis piece "The Light".

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Fans of Richard Thompson should enjoy this 1991 charity compilation put out by his British fanzine "Hokey Pokey". Highlights include Bob Adams, John French, Henry Kaiser and the Dregs' Andy West on "The Madness of Love", a song RT wrote but has never recorded, Julian Dawson's "Shrink", Iain Matthews performing "Reno Nevada" (a Richard Farina song Fairport Convention played back in Iain's day), Gregson and Collister's "Standing in the Shadows", Linda Thompson's "Her Father Was a Sailor", and the 1989 version of Fairport's live Cropredy rendition of "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" Former Fairporters Ashley Hutchings, Jerry Donahue, and the late Sandy Denny (on a 1976 demo) also appear. Richard Thompson's contribution is a duet with bassist Danny Thompson on "The May Day Psalter", one of RT's lesser songs. Much of the album is folk music, and if you're heavily into British folk, add another star. This CD is much more consistent than the next Hokey Pokey compilation, "All Through the Year", so try to track this one down first.

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Sisters Hanitra and Noro joined Madagascar band Tarika Sammy's Sammy and Tiana for an international touring lineup, but after the great "Fanafody" album, Hanitra and Sammy began fighting for control of the band. The inevitable breakup seems to have occurred between the recording of "Balance" and its release. Hanitra and Noro later hired a new band and became simply "Tarika". The album splits the difference, calling the band "TARIKA sammy". The liner notes call Hanitra "now the acknowledged leader", but they're uncredited and were probably written by her.

"Balance" is better than early Tarika albums "Bibiango" and "Son Egal", not as good as "Soul Makassar", "D", or "Fanafody". Sammy has always tended more to melody and acoustic instruments, Hanitra to rhythm. Her influence shows up here in songs like "Roba", "Bekily", the Malagasy rap of "Jijy", and "Ventso". The latter blends the two styles the best, alternating a rhythmic sing-song with delicate acoustic guitar passages. Other good songs include Sammy's "Mila Namana", Hanitra's "Hendry", and the Levelo tune "Jono". This is a 3-1/2 star album; I'm rounding up. The album was produced by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull fame, who has always been sort of a mentor to Tarika.

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Jeff Wayne's 1978 musical version of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" isn't a classic, but it contains some really good music and should appeal to fans of progressive rock and the Moody Blues. The songs and instrumentals are interwoven with a narration by Richard Burton, and the singers include the Moodies' Justin Hayward (his two songs charted as singles in the U.K., with "Forever Autumn" hitting #5), Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott, and David Essex. There's good guitar work in the instrumentals "Horsell Common and the Heat Ray" and "The Artilleryman and the Fighting Machine", and "Artilleryman" includes an insanely catchy synthesizer theme. Wayne throws in the character of the narrator's fiancee for no reason whatsoever -- except that he had co-written a fantastic lost-love song called "Forever Autumn" and it was so good that he needed to find a way to work it into the album. The song here has Burton's narration in the middle of it; if you're looking for the original single mix, you'll need to go to a Moody Blues greatest hits album to find it. The album's biggest downside is that its second half is much weaker than the first; the songs aren't as good, are too long, and have hammy vocal performances. Much of the album sounds dated today, especially the disco beats on "The Eve of the War" and "Artilleryman". Depicting the Martian fighting machines by having someone sing "Ooooo-laaaa" was intended to sound eerie, but comes off as sort of goofy. This is a 3-1/2 star album: good enough that I can get songs from it stuck in my head for days, but at the same time I sometimes go years without having the urge to listen to it.

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When Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, most observers figured the band was through. But by the time the news broke, the band was already a month into work on a new album. Unable to settle on a replacement singer, the group finally concluded that drummer Phil Collins was better than the people they were auditioning. The resulting album ended up outselling any of their albums with Gabriel.

This is a wonderful album, from the moment the first punches of "Dance on a Volcano" jump out of Mike Rutherford's gentle guitar intro, to Collins revisiting "Supper's Ready" lyrics during the fade-out of "Los Endos". Strong rockers like "Dance on a Volcano", "Squonk", and "Los Endos" are intermixed with magical ballads like "Entangled" and "Ripples". David Hentschel's production is clearer than on most previous Genesis albums; in particular, Collins' drums are more audible in the mix than ever before. With Gabriel's strong personality gone, keyboardist Tony Banks began to dominate the band; he worked keyboard solos into everyone else's songs, and got a couple of long-dormant songs of his own ("A Trick of the Tail", "Mad Man Moon") onto the album. But everything Banks does works here (not always the case on the follow-up, "Wind and Wuthering"). A side effect of Banks' emergence was that guitarist Steve Hackett got fewer leads to play; on "Mad Man Moon", he barely appears. Hackett and Rutherford use the trademark Genesis dual 12-string acoustic sound to great effect on Hackett's "Entangled" and Rutherford's "Ripples". "Los Endos" provides a big finish with a blazing instrumental that uses a riff from "It's Yourself" (a song that was left off the album, but is available on the "Archive #2" boxed set) and throws in reprises of "Dance on a Volcano" and "Squonk"; the song became the closer of Genesis' live set for over a decade. For lovers of time signatures, "Dance on a Volcano" and the bridge of "Mad Man Moon" are in 7/8, while the keyboard solo in "Robbery Assault & Battery" is in a near-uncountable 13/8. This is a close second to "Foxtrot" as my favorite Genesis album.

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When author Kpomassie was a teenager in his native Togo in the '50s, he nearly died in a fall, and was pledged by his father to become a priest of the python cult that cured him. While looking for a way around this future, he happened upon a book about Greenland and became obsessed with the idea of moving there and becoming a hunter. Over the course of several years, Kpomassie worked his way across West Africa and Europe before arriving in Greenland in the early '60s. He was possibly the first African to visit Greenland, and was the first black person most of the Greenlanders had ever seen. He became a minor celebrity ("I've heard about you on the radio since you arrived in the south"), as the locals, particularly children and young women, swarmed around the exotic stranger. As he made his way up the coast of west Greenland, he stopped in several towns, where he was invariably taken into someone's home as a guest and treated to fine delicacies like seal blubber and mattak (beluga whale skin).

Kpomassie is an excellent observer, and this book is as good an introduction to Greenlandic culture as Gretel Ehrlich's "This Cold Heaven". Kpomassie is a much more straightforward writer than Ehrlich, and this book therefore makes an easier read. The reader gets to learn about two exotic cultures: Kpomassie's tales of his upbringing in the Mina tribe of Togo is as interesting as his travels in Greenland.

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This 1956 album took several doggerel poems that cartoonist Walt Kelly had used in the "Pogo" comic strip or books of collected strips, and set them to music by Norman Monath. It's pretty amazing to find this on CD. The source tapes are long gone, so the CD had to be mastered off vinyl records. As a result, there is plenty of audible surface noise and distortion. The CD also includes a couple of 45s from 1969, with Kelly reading Pogo-based children's stories in a strange affected voice, some rehearsal material, and Kelly reading aloud the preface to the collection "The Pogo Papers". The CD booklet includes six articles, ranging from biographies of Kelly and Monath to an academic treatise on nonsense verse.

People like me who collect old Pogo books will have to have this CD whatever its merits, and we will get some enjoyment out of it. Others will probably be disappointed. The album is musically weak, despite Mr. Monath's glowing review of his own work. There are only a couple of memorable melodies (such as "Go-Go Pogo"). Too many of the songs are slow, which doesn't work well for nonsense lyrics. These work better when the words fly by at a snappy pace, as on "Parsnoops" and "Potlucky", which have a fun feel comparable to the songs from Disney's "Alice in Wonderland". One problem is that many of the Kelly poems were only a few lines long; many of the tracks barely last a minute even when they're sung slowly and the lyrics are repeated. The lyrics don't sound as good slowed down, but if they weren't slowed down, the album might be 15 minutes long. This is a dilemma the album never solves. Kelly sings two songs himself, and recites the inevitable tribute to Old Dog Tray on "Man's Best Friend". One other song that works is "The Keen and the Quing", which pokes fun at its own string arrangement. As far as comic strip tie-ins go, this is better than "Jimmy Thudpucker's Greatest Hits", but not as good as a 78 I once owned of Popeye singing about brushing teeth.

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This 1976 album was Genesis' last studio album before they began their transition to pop, as well as guitarist Steve Hackett's last album. The band was trying to return to the drama of "Foxtrot", but the album has pacing problems. There are too many songs with few moving parts, and as a result the songs come off seeming slower than they really are, giving the overall album a plodding feel. More upbeat pieces like "Pigeons" and Hackett's "Please Don't Touch" were left off the album, which didn't help. While all the songs are fine on their own, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. If you're already a fan of '70s Genesis, this is definitely worth buying; if you're not, there are better Genesis albums to try first.

There are three great songs here: "Eleventh Earl of Mar", the instrumental "...in That Quiet Earth", and the ballad "Blood on the Rooftops" (despite the title, it's actually about watching too much TV, and it features some lovely acoustic work by Hackett). The other songs are ones that Genesis fans grow to enjoy, but may not impress the casual listener. "One for the Vine" is the most problematic track -- a long story-song by keyboardist Tony Banks that just isn't catchy enough to sustain its 10-minute length. It straddles the border between enjoyment and tedium, but some fans consider it a classic. "Your Own Special Way" is a pretty ballad, but the electric piano bridge is SO slow that the album screeches to a halt. "Afterglow" is a block-chord finale that is a favorite of many Genesis fans, with impassioned singing by Phil Collins. "Wot Gorilla?" (an instrumental based on the catchiest riff from "One for the Vine") and "All in a Mouse's Night" (just what the title suggests) are the most inconsequential cuts on the album, but at the same time they're two of the liveliest tracks. I hope that someday the CD will be re-issued with the "Spot the Pigeon" songs included (three outtakes that were released as an EP).

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Ten years ago, I thought taking a ferry up the west coast of Greenland would be a great vacation. I'll never get there, but Gretel Ehrlich's book about her several trips to the northwest Greenland towns of Uummannaq, Illorsuit, and Qaanaaq has more than satisfied my curiosity. The book is an astounding look at as remote a spot as still exists on earth today -- an area so isolated by ice and weather that the way of life seems primitive beyond belief -- and the people who live there. Qaanaaq is so far north that the sun never rises from late October until February, and never sets for four months in the spring and summer. Most of the people in these towns are subsistence hunters, relying on the seals, walrus, narwhals, polar bears, caribou, hares, foxes, and birds they can catch to feed and clothe them (there are basically no edible plants there except berries). Until recently their houses were built of stone and peat, and even today most belongings and equipment are made of stone or animal body parts. Ehrlich presents the brutal difficulty of the hardscrabble life in detail, yet still conveys the Greenlandic love of this way of life so well that you are saddened to learn that the encroaching reach of consumer society and global climate change may bring it to an end.

Ehrlich's descriptions of her travels and the people she meets (for example, the dogsled maker "who knew all about trees but had never seen one growing") are fascinating and incisive. There are also several interesting chapters recounting the explorations of Knud Rasmussen, a Greenlandic national hero who traveled northern Greenland and the Canadian Arctic documenting the Inuit culture. Ehrlich's obsession with Rockwell Kent, an artist who spent time in Illorsuit, is less interesting. The weakest part of the book is Ehrlich's tendency to jump from crystalline narration into amorphous, abstract reveries ("Darkness reconciles all time and disparity. It is a kind of rapture in which life is no longer lived brokenly."); thankfully, these moments become fewer as the book goes on. People who are morally opposed to hunting are hereby warned that several long chapters cover Ehrlich accompanying locals on hunting trips by dogsled.

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This 1973 live album is compiled from two concerts on the "Foxtrot" tour, and was originally recorded for the US radio show "King Biscuit Flower Hour". The band tackles five of their early songs, each 8 to 11 minutes in length. None of the songs sound much different than the studio versions, but they are played more powerfully here, and the interplay between the musicians is great. "The Knife" in particular stands out; it's harder-edged than the "Trespass" version, especially with Steve Hackett playing the guitar solo instead of Anthony Phillips. Several of the songs contrast loud and quiet passages in a manner similar to classical music. The contribution of Peter Gabriel's flute to the overall early Genesis sound tends to get overlooked, but it stands out here. I've had this album for 20 years, and it was only while listening to it in preparation for writing this review that I realized it's keyboardist Tony Banks trading guitar licks with Hackett on the "I touch the wall" section of "The Musical Box", and not Michael Rutherford (who's playing a fast rhythm strum throughout); at one point, Banks goes right from a guitar lead to an electric piano solo. Because it was originally a radio show, there is no between-song patter except Gabriel's announcement of "an unaccompanied bass pedal solo from Michael Rutherford" -- there are none of the weird stories Gabriel would tell between songs while the guitarists changed tunings, though one of these stories is provided in the CD booklet.

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