Album Review, Genesis, "We Can't Dance"

Well, this has been the year of the big releases hasn't it? I mean VAN HALEN were busy F.U.C.K.ing around while METALLICA went black to basics and G N' R got a bit ‘Illusioned’ – twice, while DIRE STRAITS managed to put me to sleep and BRYAN ADAMS super-glued himself to the Number One spot with the first single of his neighbourhood shattering double LP.

Now for your delight and pleasure, those seminal proggies GENESIS have set free the result of not working together for nearly four years. It really doesn't sound like it, 'cos it's still dull. I thought the break would have done them good.

I was hoping that this would be a return to GENESIS as they used to be, but I'm afraid not. It's pretty much splattered with those fucking awful drum machine clicks and pops accompanying drab unmemorable songs, half of which sound like PHIL COLLINS with a band.

The single No Son Of Mine is okay, probably because I’ve heard it so many times, then there’s the marathon 10 mins and 9 secs of Driving The Last Spike that goes on and on and finally goes home.

Title track? Yep, it’s got one. Side two opens with a nice number called Tell Me Why, which gave me some hope, but when faced with Hold On My Heart, Way Of The World, and Fading Lights, I decided an earlier offer of burning slithers of bamboo under my finger nails was more to my taste.

What has happened to these people we looked to for great songs? Now it would seem everything depends on the marketing side. I can't wait to see what they come up with for this one. I mean DIRE STRAITS had road signs everywhere. Maybe there'll be a load of folks with broken legs going around on crutches with a sign round their neck? Sad isn't it?

GRADE D

Peter Grant
Riff Raff
January 1992

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!