Nursery Cryme

Nursery Cryme is the third studio album by Genesis and was recorded and released in 1971. It is the band's first album with drummer Phil Collins and guitarist Steve Hackett, who replaced John Mayhew and Anthony Phillips, respectively, in 1970 and 1971. The five-member line-up of Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Collins and Hackett would remain consistent until the band's 1976 album A Trick of the Tail, when Phil Collins replaced Peter Gabriel as lead vocalist following Gabriel's departure from the band. Nursery Cryme is also the band's shortest studio album. (wiki)

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by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

If Genesis truly established themselves as progressive rockers on Trespass, Nursery Cryme is where their signature persona was unveiled: true English eccentrics, one part Lewis Carroll and one part Syd Barrett, creating a fanciful world that emphasized the band's instrumental prowess as much as Peter Gabriel's theatricality. Which isn't to say that all of Nursery Cryme works. There are times when the whimsy is overwhelming, just as there are periods when there's too much instrumental indulgence, yet there's a charm to this indulgence, since the group is letting itself run wild. Even if they've yet to find the furthest reaches of their imagination, part of the charm is hearing them test out its limits, something that does result in genuine masterpieces, as on "The Musical Box" and "The Return of the Giant Hogweed," two epics that dominate the first side of the album and give it its foundation. If the second side isn't quite as compelling or quite as structured, it doesn't quite matter because these are the songs that showed what Genesis could do, and they still stand as pinnacles of what the band could achieve.