Genesis: Three Sides Live : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Live albums generally are a retrospective of a band's career from the beginning, but Three Sides Live stands as testimony to what Genesis has become only very recently. Unlike Seconds Out, where the concert versions of Genesis' songs were shrouded in virtuosic bluster, this album offers incisive, sharply focused performances uncluttered by theatrics or instrumental tedium. Where once Genesis represented art-rock at its most fatuously spectacular, they now show how lean and compelling such music can be. At the center of this change is singer Phil Collins, whose husky vocals no longer merely adorn the instrumental tracks but provide them with direction and pacing. Although Collins is hardly versatile, he is remarkably adept at projecting personality into Genesis' music, which in turn keeps the instrumental excesses in check.

While all of this might have easily been expected after the leaner sound of last year's Abacab, it's still worth noting that Genesis has applied its new perspective to older material, even shrinking such songs as "The Colony of Slippermen" and "The Cinema Show" into a single, concise medley. Too bad that the fourth side of Three Sides Live, comprising unreleased material, is flat semipop that was better left in the vaults.