Yet Another New Beginning for Genesis

Within the context of commercial pop, Genesis’ first album with a new lineup in almost 20 years is a successful collection of mainstream songs, most of them of a depressing nature. But in the past, the band has offered music that was vastly more exciting and enigmatic, even in the years when its output seemed to be one and the same with the solo career of easy-listening tycoon Phil Collins.

Surprisingly, the problem in “Calling All Stations” is not the new singer, Ray Wilson. His compelling voice actually harks back to a very young Peter Gabriel (the band’s original singer and most provocative persona), which would have allowed for a return to Genesis’ more English and pastoral roots.

Relying instead on the instantly recognizable keyboard textures of Tony Banks and Michael Rutherford’s affinity for Euro-pop melodies, the album contains a few pleasures, especially in the hopelessly romantic “Shipwrecked” and the tribal “The Dividing Line.” But the Genesis of the new millennium has by now nothing in common with the group that created masterpieces as evocative as “Wind & Wuthering” and “Selling England by the Pound.”

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