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. With
Collins as their new frontman, 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. Also,
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. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
