Calling All Stations

There have been some pretty strongly negative comments about "Calling All Stations". I once saw a website by a guy who had rated over a thousand albums on a scale of 1-10. Only about a dozen albums had gotten his worst '1' rating. "Calling All Stations" was one of them (no other Genesis album had scored lower than a '5', and some were in the 8-10 range).

One could argue the merits of that conclusion, and in particular whether the music suffered from the absence of Phil Collins, both his vocal/drum performance and his contribution to the musical composition. I have my thoughts on that, but that's not where I'm headed with this post.

I didn't much care for it on the first couple of listens either, but eventually I came around to thinking it wasn't so bad after all, and some of the tracks on it are pretty good. Part of how I did that involved a thought exercise of sorts. Now most of you in this group are also fans of other progressive rock bands. If you're one of them, and you didn't think much of "Calling All Stations", I'd recommend giving the following approach a try.

Pretend it's not Genesis. Pretend it's some progressive rock band you've just discovered. Once I put aside my Genesis expectations and gave the album a more objective listen, I discovered it's a better album than I had given it credit for.

Having done that, once I started reapplying some of my Genesis expectations, it still pales in comparison to most of their previous work, and is still a candidate for their worst album. But at least we're talking more like "2.5 stars out of 5" worst, which is a far cry better than "absolute crap" worst.

If anyone who reads this hates this album, please try the above and post the results here.

I agree. I too found "Calling all stations" not too bad after a while. Genesis has been through many shifts-so to say...and you can't just compere it to "themselves". Don't know if I make any sense here...? Anyway.... :)