Invisible Touch - Genesis (1986)
Quality or nostalgia: was younger me onto something, or just on something?
Genesis was a band that entered my consciousness and just kept surprising me. Oh, Phil Collins is also in a band? Oh, he’s in a band with the guy from Mike & The Mechanics? Oh, they’re in a band that Peter Gabriel used to be in?
So I had none of the baggage that older fans did about how Phil took over a prog rock institution and turned it into a pop hit factory. All I heard was a ridiculously catchy album by a band I hadn’t known anything about.
Not exactly proggy or funky, it definitely has some elements of both. One of Collins’ great abilities, imo, was to take very difficult musical techniques and ideas and craft them into something everybody could get into.
Produced by the band along with Hugh Padgham (a producer of pedigree, although being friends with Phil Collins and Sting is an excellent career track), this record has fewer of the hallmarks of the earlier Genesis. Even the recent couple of Collins-led Genesis records had some nastiness and edge. But here that’s balanced out with pure Collins-branded pop rock. That said, the three remaining members are all excellent musicians who are capable of much more than basic pop, and that talent shows through in the musicianship and the quality of the material.
So is it Quality or Nostalgia?
I’ll be honest: A Sunday afternoon in 1994 of delivering pizzas while mildly stoned and spinning this album forced a major reevaluation for me (note: don’t drive while impaired. It’s only by the grace of God that I survived a couple years of those habits). I hadn’t known or appreciated how much of the prog-era Genesis’ ambition and vision was still there shining through on the second side when I first encountered it.
That wrinkle makes this album much more interesting. The pop songs are still classic pop songs and are recorded in a way that still pays off when you turn it up. Anything She Does sounds like a lost Police hit, Land of Confusion is a nasty guitar-heavy banger. But it’s all rounded out with the grandeur and driving neurosis on that dense and fabulous second side, in The Brazilian and the extended workout Domino especially.
This is powerhouse of a record.
