Abacab - SACD-Hybrid / DVD - 2007

Tracks on the SACD / CD:

Abacab
No Reply At All
Me And Sarah Jane
Keep It Dark
Dodo / Lurker
Who Dunnit?
Man On The Corner
Like it Or Not
Another Record

DVD content:

full album in Dolby Digital 5.1 (audio only)
full album in dts Surround (audio only)
Making of Abacab - 2007 band interviews
Abacab (music video)
No Reply At All (music video)
Man On The Corner (music video)
Keep It Dark (music video)
World Tour programme 1981 (gallery, 15 pictures)

Technical data:

The music videos are available in stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 and dts sound (as on the Video Show DVD). All other content is stereo 2.0. There are no subtitles.

Review

The album - Like It Or Not!

There is little discussion amongst fans that Abacab is the most controversial Genesis album – for various reasons. Many fans of the music Genesis would make later cannot get into this album as it is too abstract, too challenging for them. Fans of the band’s early years with Steve Hackett (and Peter Gabriel) could follow the band’s idea up to Duke, but turned away from the band when they heard Abacab.

Despite that, or rather, because of that Abacab is the most courageous album Genesis have made. Without Abacab the later albums would not have had the form they now have, and the early years of the band would soon have been forgotten because later fan generations would simply never have discovered it. Genesis cut out dead wood and trimmed their sound. As a result of Phil’s session work for Peter Gabriel’s third album they also gave the drum sound more space. Abacab sounds cleaner and more open than previous albums, and yet it is enormously powerful and musically most provoking. While the use of a brass ensemble on No Reply At All may have been one of Genesis’s biggest blunders (because it simply invited comparison to Phil Collins’s solo sound as evident on his then newly released solo album Face Value), the lead guitar in Keep It Dark constantly repeated only six notes, which was an affront against the complexity of older songs. Abacab also features the best-hated song in the history of the band, the almost perverse Who Dunnit. It was Genesis’s answer to the punk era they had survived and to which they owed this metamorphosis. They even played it live – with Mike Rutherford on the drums.

As opposed to all other albums Genesis have consciously chosen this sound for the album. If you have your own studio you can do that. And they still like to mock themselves: In the last song they urge listeners to put Another Record on, and the penultimate song tells the fans what to do with this album: Like It Or Not.

A full review of the album can be found here.