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Released: February 2, 1976


Rating: 4.082 (average of 10 ratings)


Genre: progressive rock


Quotable: --


Album Tracks:

  1. Dance on a Volcano
  2. Entangled
  3. Squonk
  4. Mad Man Moon
  5. Robbery, Assault and Battery
  6. Ripples
  7. A Trick of the Tail
  8. Los Endos


Sales:

sales in U.S. only ½ million
sales in U.K. only - estimated 100,000
sales in all of Europe as determined by IFPI – click here to go to their site. --
sales worldwide - estimated 3.5 million


Peak:

peak on U.S. Billboard album chart 31
peak on U.K. album chart 3


Singles/Hit Songs:

  • A Trick of the Tail (3/76) --


A Trick of the Tail
Genesis
Review:
“After Peter Gabriel departed for a solo career, Genesis embarked on a long journey to find a replacement, only to wind back around to their drummer, Phil Collins, as a replacement” (Erlewine). “The band tried to maintain its old self. Collins openly imitated Gabriel, and when Banks and Rutherford stepped forward as the main songwriters, they kept up the oblique storytelling lyrics and the multipart structures, cinched by the filigree and sinew of Steve Hackett’s guitar” (Pareles).

However, “the band decided not to pursue the stylish, jagged postmodernism of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway – a move that Gabriel would do in his solo career – and instead returned to the English eccentricity of Selling England by the Pound for its next effort, A Trick of the Tail. In almost every respect, this feels like a truer sequel to Selling England by the Pound than Lamb; after all, that double album was obsessed with modernity and nightmare, whereas this album returns the group to the fanciful fairy tale nature of its earlier records” (Erlewine).

“Genesis were moving away from the barbed pop of the first LP and returning to elastic numbers that showcased their instrumental prowess, and they sounded more forceful and unified as a band than they had since Foxtrot. Not that this album is quite as memorable as Foxtrot or Selling England, largely because its songs aren’t as immediate or memorable: apart from Dance on a Volcano, this is about the sound of the band playing, not individual songs, and it succeeds on that level quite wildly – to the extent that it proved to longtime fans that Genesis could possibly thrive without its former leader in tow” (Erlewine).


Review Source(s):
  • Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
  • Jon Pareles, Blender magazine. (10/07), pp.118-9.


Related DMDB Links:

previous studio album: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) Genesis’ DMDB page next studio album: Wind & Wuthering (1976)


Last updated April 3, 2008.