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You would be hard-pressed to find an album with more to unpack than this one. With 40 years of hindsight, the canon of classic prog has been pretty well established. Us prog types tend to list and grade more than any other, but the same albums and bands come up time and time again. Then you have The Lamb, easily one of the most important and infamous prog albums of them all, but it feels like nobody has quite figured it out yet. 

Then again, Genesis in those days were some odd species of duck. Prog singers were often about function; sure, you've got the Peter Hammills who can really belt it out, but for the most part they were fine so long as they could hit all the notes and harmonise. Lyrics, sure, they were important too, but you were never really required to analyse them; Jon Anderson's were a fun mix of hippie profundity and nonsense, and if that bothered you, it just wasn't your genre.

Genesis, on the other hand, had a frontman you couldn't ignore; in Peter Gabriel, you had a guy who wore costumes on stage, told stories between songs, and would lapse into different voices on a whim. Gabriel's lyrics were usually strange, disturbed tales - maybe you can brush off a ridiculous Anderson lyric like "shining, flying, purple wolfhound, show me where you are", but Gabriel yelling "TOUCH ME NOW! NOW! NOW!" in his old man voice is something else entirely. Gabriel's presence (and the band's lack of a real soloist) was so dominant that it almost obscured the fact that there was a wealth of talent standing behind him.

 

The early 70s were a particularly fertile time for progressive rock - between 1971 and 1972 you had Fragile, Close To The Edge, Pawn Hearts, Tago Mago, Thick As A Brick, 666 and Octopus, among many others. Genesis had done a couple of classic albums themselves in that period. This was a time when progressive rock was still progressive - bands felt the need to up the stakes and take big leaps every time out, hence things went nuts in the following years. Yes infamously released ten songs spread over eight sides of music between 1972 and 1974 (to say nothing of their triple LP live set); ELP's Brain Salad Surgery had a piece so long it didn't even fit on one side of the album (to say nothing of their live triple LP).

 

 

And this was the world Genesis found themselves in. Sure, they'd done a side-long track already, and their previous LP, Selling England By The Pound, was about as perfect as prog rock albums came. But in 1974 it was go big or go home. 

So, we were given The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.