One of rock's more theatrical bands comes up with its most musical LP to date, showing they can come over just as well on record as on stage with this semi-concept LP. Highlights are the recognizable Peter Gabriel lead vocals and the strong organ instrumental backup. Band sometimes sounds like some of the "electronic" British groups, but on this double package they show themselves more as a skilled rock group whose instrumental trickery is a means to the good music end. Several possible singles here, but expect strongest play to come from the FM markets.
- Billboard, 1974.
I wanted to call this the most readable album since Quadrophenia, but it's only the wordiest -- two inner sleeves covered with lyrics and a double-fold that's all small-type libretto. The apparent subject is the symbolic quest of a Puerto Rican hood/street kid/graffiti artist named Rael, but the songs neither shine by themselves nor suggest any thematic insight I'm eager to pursue. For art-rock, though, it's listenable, from Eno treatments to a hook that goes (I'm humming) "on Braw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-dway." B-
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
The most successful album for Genesis was, whisper it, a concept album; a loose concept though, more a fantasy of adolescent preoccupations put to music. The trouble with fantasy, except in the hands of an exceptional story teller, is that the images and allusions are private, understood and of real significance to the author alone. Effort taken to delve into the meaning of The Lamb Lies Down... could well be time wasted but both Gabriel's essay/story and lyrics are printed in full in the booklet making them amenable to further study.
The complicated staging for The Lamb Lies Down... was taken to America and broke the band there in a big way. It came as a major surprise therefore that this was the last album recorded by Gabriel.
Compact Disc certainly makes far more of the scene-setting sonic interludes produced for the album by Brian Eno than vinyl ever did. The recording however was not the most technically advanced for its time.
- David Prakel, Rock 'n' Roll on Compact Disc, 1987.
This, the last Genesis album with Peter Gabriel, is a sprawling two-disc thematic album concerning a character named Rael. Keeping with that theme, it includes pastiches of Broadway show music, plus the group's typical mixture of folk, rock, and classical influences. If this is not the first Gabriel Genesis album to buy, it ultimately may prove the most satisfying. * * * * *
- William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
Because its narrative is fairly oblique, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway works as a flowing, almost formless concept piece, a musical journey rather than a dogmatic treatise. * * * * 1/2
