It shows no or at best only the most minuscule traces of the style that would make them well-known later, and therefore frequently meets with a refusal and lack of affection. Justly so?
- Gary Graff, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.
In its prime, this English prog band set the standard for concept albums with this weird, wild but incredibly coherent tour de force. An art-rock classic among theatrical, story-driven efforts, if a trifle bloated and pretentious, this intense double record was an epic swan song for charismatic singer Peter Gabriel before, some disgruntled fans say, "Phil Collins turned the group into a shallow hit machine." * * * * *
- Zagat Survey Music Guide - 1,000 Top Albums of All Time, 2003.
Although 1974 can be seen as the apogee of progressive rock excess, this album is dark and brittle with spare instrumentation. Recorded in rural Wales at a difficult time for Genesis, with Peter Gabriel's vocals captured separately in London's Island Studios, the album actually displays the group at their most bite-sized.
Gabriel was, at that time, being courted as a serious writer and took it upon himself to write a modern-day Pilgrim's Progress, which begins with Rael, a leather-clad Puerto Rican street punk, seeing a lamb -- wait for it -- lying down on Broadway. Whether anyone, Gabriel included, really understood what it was about is open to conjecture, but the double album features some of his most consistent writing and the band's pithiest playing.
"Back in NYC," covered by Jeff Buckley on his final recordings, signposts punk; "In The Cage" is as readily climactic as "Supper's Ready," but in just eight minutes; "Carpet Crawlers" gave the group another anthem; and "The Chamber Of 32 Doors" allows the soul music that Gabriel was steeped in as a teenager to spill over.
With its clean, modern, Hipgnosis cover, the album was finally released to general acclaim at the end of 1974. It is a vocalist's record, which is why the musicians hated it, and Gabriel loved it. Clear that he would never again be allowed quite so much leeway on a Genesis album, at the end of the grueling world tour to support the album, he was gone.
- Daryl Easlea, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, 2005.
From back when Peter Gabriel was their singer and Phil Collins merely the drummer, this double-LP concept album follows a street urchin's misadventures in the New York underworld. An essential classic-prog album.
- David Browne, Entertainment Weekly, 5/13/2005.
This sometimes talky art-rock epic is more than two hours long. That's a significant time investment, considering the primary lyricist, Peter Gabriel, intended audiences to follow his tale of a half-Puerto Rican juvenile delinquent on the loose in New York from start to finish. Inevitably, you lose something by parachuting in somewhere in the middle.
Still, by parachuting in, you can quickly determine whether you're tempermentally disposed toward Lamb, one of the towering peaks of progressive rock. Cue up the eight-minute "In the Cage," on disc 1. Listen to its mad-hatter keyboard arpeggios and thrashing tilt-a-whirl rhythms. Check out the music edge in Gabriel's voice. If the fitful, sometimes suffocating, trapped-in-a-psychodrama feeling of the tune makes you curious about what happens next, go back to the beginning and settle in for a rare treat. If, however, you're not completely enthralled, stay away. (Instead seek out the less demanding Genesis album Trick of the Tail.)
While Lamb's lyrics overflow with visions of majestic grandeur (practically a prerequisite for British art-rock), the music exhibits a grind-it-out grittiness, with muscular, at times even funky, polyrhythms. It's possible to love Lamb and not care at all about the story: The band's cohesive attack is intriguing enough to atone for any stray moments of overblown pageantry.
When Lamb was released in 1974, drummer Phil Collins told an interviewer that "It's about a schizophrenic." Gabriel called his primary character, Rael, a "split personality." Attempting to rescue his brother John, Rael finds himself swept underground, where he encounters grisly video game-style fantasy figures that impede his progress. As the work goes on, the real and subterranean worlds interconnect in odd, hallucinatory ways. By the end, it seems that Rael is on a youth's quest to discover himself, not his sibling. Cosmic? Yes. Go down that rabbit hole. All will become clear.
- Tom Moon, 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die, 2008.
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