Bad live cd

Every song on this cd is a joke. Genesis used to be a good band, look into Genesis Live, Seconds Out, or Genesis Archives Vol. 1 for better live material.

Better than being there

I saw Genesis on the "We Can't Dance" Tour in Hannover, Germany. And while I certainly was completely blown away by that concert, this record delivers even more of what a Genesis concert should be like.



Yes, I admit that I'm no fan of their earlier stuff. Matter of taste, surely. Also, it was just before my time. Anyhow, what I liked most about "The Way We Walk Vol. 1 - The Shorts" was the absence of all those older, overly lengthy, artistic songs that don't really mean anything to me. Precisely what other reviewers here lamented -- that everything on this record comes from just three albums, namely "Genesis", "Invisible Touch", and "We Can't Dance" -- makes it so great for me; for as far as I'm concerned, Genesis before those is rather uninspiring.



The performances are just as great as could righteously be expected. I think that the energy from the (quite audible) audience really adds nicely to the band's, especially of course in the Phil Collins trademark back-and-forth singing contest with the audience at the beginning of "Throwing It All Away", but also quite notably at the beginning of "I Can't Dance" (watch out for the audience's reaction to the "boing" sound!). Subtly altered lyrics, mostly a little naughtier than the originals, add to the personal feeling -- it feels like being there. And that "I Can't Dance" was recorded before a German audience, as becomes clear from the shouts of "Zugabe! Zugabe!" (encore) at the end, just means the last bit of delight for me. Hey, I might have been there after all!



If you insist that something negative must be said about this record, I'll admit that I didn't care for the long-winded endings of "No Son of Mine", and especially "I Can't Dance". I keep thinking, "come on, man, that's enough", but on and on he goes. But that's a really minor nuisance. No reason to cut down the five star rating.



If you're from the same generation as I am -- us who grew up with the sinister "Ha ha! Ha! *rowr*" from "Mama", the Spitting Image puppets from "Land of Confusion", and the Levis spots that got so brilliantly defaced in "I Can't Dance" -- this is The Essential Genesis Record. If not, kindly disregard this review.

Good Compilation of Genesis Hits

This is a good live album. The recording quality is excellent and Phil's vocals soar. I would give this album 4.5 stars just because I'm not very partial to 80's Genesis songs. Invisible touch, Jesus he knows me, Mama, and No Son of Mine are excellent however. I would recommend "The Longs" over this if you are more into old Genesis.

Live album that doubles as a Greatest Hits album

This is an unusual live album, in that all of the 11 songs were singles. All of the songs are from the "Genesis", "Invisible Touch", and "We Can't Dance" albums (recorded on the stadium tour for the latter album), and since these albums included nearly all of Genesis' biggest hits, the album doubles as a Greatest Hits album. This nudges it up half a star. The album works best when combined with "The Longs" album (the long songs from the tour) in your CD programmer or on a tape.

My favorite cuts are "Throwing It All Away", with an endearing call-and-response between Phil Collins and the audience at the start and end, "Jesus He Knows Me", given a brief guitar solo and Collins' patter at the end, and "In Too Deep", which just comes off sounding better than on the original album. "Mama" loses a verse, and "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" is stopped in mid-song to go into a closer of "Invisible Touch". The pacing gets thrown off a little with a late album sequence of "Hold On My Heart" (by far the weakest song here), "That's All", and "In Too Deep"--"That's All"'s mid-tempo isn't enough to perk things up between these two slow ballads. The closing section of "No Son of Mine" seems to be begging to be sped up a little, but it doesn't happen. This may be a side-effect of most of these songs being written using drum machines; the same MIDI click track was probably being used to run the light show.

(1=poor 2=mediocre 3=pretty good 4=very good 5=phenomenal)

Yes it's more Commercial than Old Genesis, but its very good

When it comes to the rock band, Genesis - I think this band is often unfarily criticized for going "commercial". Yes, the band did move into more of a pop-music direction in the 1980s, but I think they added a breath of fresh air to the pop music and paritcularly 80s landscape. As a result, Genesis picked up a lot of new fans - many of whom probably went on to appreciate many of their earlier works. The album, "The Way We Walk - Volume 1: The Shorts" presents a collection of 11 live tracks from what is considered the commercial/pop era of Genesis.



When I look at Genesis as band, I see four distinct phases the band has gone through. Phase 1 is the Peter Gabriel Era. This spans from 1969 ("From Genesis to Revelation") to 1974 ("The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway"). It was during Phase 1 that Peter Gabriel was the lead vocalist and Genesis could easily be categorized as a progressive Rock band. Phase 2 is the Early Phil Collins Era spanning from 1976 ("A Trick of the Tail") to 1982 ("Three Sides Live"). In this era, Phil Collins took over as lead singer. The band was still very much a progressive rock band, but as the progressive rock landscape would change - so would Genesis. This might indirectly have led to Phase 3 which is the Late Phil Collins Era from 1983 ("Genesis") to 1993 ("The Way We Walk Volume 2: The Longs"). This is the commercial/pop era that I referred to earlier. At this point, there would be a lot less progressive rock flavor to Genesis' music. The fourth phase, Phase 4 is the Ray Wilson Era. This was when Ray Wilson took over as lead vocalist for Phil Collins. There would only be one album in this era - 1997's "Calling All Stations" and it seemed like Genesis tried to recapture some of their progressive rock roots - but 90s style. "Calling All Stations" would do poor commercially and Ray Wilson would take the fall and be asked to leave the band.



In Phase 3, Genesis would grow more and more successful commercially with each album release. Some of this probably would do to the fact that Phil Collins' solo career was also taking off. The last studio album that Phil Collins would do with Genesis was "We Can't Dance". It was a huge commercial success and resulted in a hugely successful World Tour. Naturally, the band decided to capitalize on the success of that World Tour by releasing a live album and video. Genesis had done live albums before ("Three Sides Live", "Seconds Out", "Genesis Live"). On each live album, the focus of the live material would on the studio releases that had not been done live up until that point. Genesis had not done a live release for Phase 3, thus "The Way We Walk" would have a focus on this material. For this live release, Genesis would employ a unique formula - they would release the material in a two volume set called "The Way We Walk". Volume 1 would focus on the shorter (normal) length songs. Volume 2 would focus on Genesis' trademark longer songs. For the purposes of this review, I'll focus on Volume 1.



Normally when there is a live release, I prefer the album to be a live recording from a single concert performance. I prefer it to be delivered in the order in which the songs were actually delivered. By having things from a single night and in order - I feel there is continuity and the magic of the concert is captured perfectly. Since Genesis took this unique approach to the way they were presenting this live material, this was going to be very hard to do. However, the material was strong enough to overcome this. Yes, I still would have preferred a two volume CD that contained a night from the 1992 "We Can't Dance" Tour in its entirety, but the production and engineering isn't bad and it does a nice job at ordering the songs and giving the "quasi appearance" that this may be from one night (even though the ordering is shuffled). I also like the two volume approach - I find it very convienient to listen to either the "short" songs or "long" songs (depending on my mood)".



The most interesting song is "Invisible Touch". I always thought this was an "average" song for Genesis, but there is something about hearing this song live that blows me away. I love the way they end the song. I also love how they segue from "Tonight Tonight Tonight" into "Invisible Touch". Yes they made "Tonight Tonight Tonight" from a long song to a short one, but it works the way they performed this song and the segue. Similar to "Invisible Touch", I love Genesis' spin on "Throwing It All Away" - featuring Phil leading the crowd in a participatory "It away!" chant and Mike Rutherford's guitar is awesome in it. Two strong songs from "We Can't Dance" are "No Son of Mine" and "Jesus He Knows Me". Phil's performance of "Jesus He Knows Me" was very theatrical in concert when I saw him and on this recording it translates very nicely to audio. Not forgetting Tony Banks, his keyboards are spellbinding on "Mama" - as are Phil's vocals.



The liner notes are weak. There are no lyrics and nothing to provide insight into the Tour - or when and where these songs were recorded. The production credits are pretty light as well. There are some decent photos from the Tour included. Although this may be Genesis' "pop" era - there still is some excellent music and this excellent music translates very well to the live setting. There may be some "old-time" fans who don't like this material, but I think this will still appeal to the majority of end to end Genesis fans.