This has a curious place in the Genesis discography, being, at best, much maligned, at worst denounced, but mostly ignored, it seems...
...And let's face facts, it isn't the greatest album ever made, and would probably come somewhere pretty low in the ranking of Genesis albums.
That said, feeling the beginnings of another Genesis kick coming on, I decided to listen to this whilst doing a little gardening today, and for the most part it's actually got a lot more going for it than is often given credit for...
...The Title track is quite a compelling work out for the band, and with Man On The Corner, No Reply At All and Another Record being fairly strong Genesis tunes, it's mostly a good album anyway; Dodo and Keep It Dark do take a little getting into, and frankly there's just no excuse, even after all these years, for Whodunnit? Which is just S*%t.
On the whole this sounds, as an album, like a gathering of all those kinds of songs which would otherwise have had to have been hunted down by fans, from the B-sides of Genesis singles, and which any other band - even Genesis themselves - might ordinarily have placed there.
It is a little flat, in comparison to others of their albums, too tentatively experimental (scrapes, squiggles, and noodles that perhaps go on for too long etc.) and as the quintessentially eighties style cover (and it's variants) shows, a pretty dated attempt to be eighties hip (bright colours, Pseudo-Picasso garishness), which is reflected in the music a little.
But still has enough moments of typically Genesis style highlights to make it worth another listen.