Genesis

The last of the three matching box sets of Genesis' back catalog Genesis 1970-1975 offers expanded reissues of every Peter Gabriel era album outside of the earliest, From Genesis to Revelation, which has essentially been reduced to a footnote to their catalog (as much due to licensing reasons as musical). So, 1970-1975 offers remastered reissues of 1970's Trespass, 1971's Nursery Cryme, 1972's Foxtrot, 1973's Selling England by the Pound, and 1974's double-album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, each presented as a double-disc set containing a remastered CD and DVD-Audio with 5.1 surround sound (in the U.K., these were released as hybrid SACDs instead of standard CDs). All the remastering is exceptional but what makes this set necessary for the devoted is the bonus material -- the video added to the DVDs and the whole disc of stray tracks. This supplemental disc has the exceptional B-side "Twilight Alehouse," the single-only "Happy the Man," the demo of the terrific "Going Out to Get You," and the BBC session that produced "Shepherd," "Pacidy," and "Let Us Now Make Love" -- all tracks that showed up on the 1998 box set Genesis Archives, Vol. 1: 1967-1975, but the real treat is the first official release of the four songs that comprise Genesis Plays Jackson, the band's soundtrack to a show by artist Michael Jackson. Add to this the video material -- limited to interviews on Trespass and Nursery Cryme, but containing full performances on Foxtrot and Selling England, plus the original slide shows used for the stage show of Lamb -- and this box turns into something extraordinary: a nearly complete portrait of a restlessly creative band at their peak, whose output only sounds more distinctive with each passing year. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide