The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (Deluxe Edition)

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Arriving closer to its actual 51st anniversary, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is celebrated in Super Deluxe style: newly remastered tapes, the full January 24, 1975 Shrine Auditorium show, and several raw, early session outtakes—all in hi-res. New mastering gives fans much to compare/contrast with the album's previous seven masters, including 20th and 40th anniversary editions and a 2008 remix. This new version acquits itself well, bringing additional degrees of clarity and scope to the (essentially unproblematic) muzzy qualities of the original mix, without fundamentally altering its all-important chemistry.

With The Lamb, Genesis turned the page on their first phase, a heady combo of pastoral folk music, historical/literary allusion and prog rock tactics brought together in ambitious theatrical compositions. They'd had great success with it, but by 1974, frontman Peter Gabriel believed that "prancing around in fairyland was rapidly becoming obsolete," conceiving instead of an "extrovert and violent" delinquent caught up in a sequence of hallucinatory encounters on New York City's mean streets. Placing Genesis' "pansy claptrap" (again, Gabriel's words) out of context in this setting was inspired; with apologies to Foxtrot-or-die Gen-heads, it made for their most powerful album to date.

Conceptually, the opus resembles The Who's Tommy, the tale of a dead-end kid whose spiritual enlightenment is triggered by a series of traumatic/transformative incidents. The impressionistic story allows for passing commentary on class, religion, sexuality and the media. Like Tommy, The Lamb's narrative details are its weakness, but this barely mitigates against the band's highly energized tumult, Gabriel's vocals and the unfettered creativity of his vision.

The widely circulated Shrine performance finds Genesis a month into The Lamb's support tour, their (at the time unannounced) final hurdle with Peter Gabriel. Their engaged full album performance provides good fun for fans, though many of them will no doubt have previously heard most of it elsewhere. Other impassioned punters may curse the small sample of The Lamb's extensively bootlegged recording sessions here. Perhaps the rough quality of these tapes weighed against a more comprehensive inclusion. The few tracks in evidence do effectively convey the uncompromising aggression fueling this epic enterprise. © Rian Murphy/Qobuz