Music Disc Reviews

THE EXTRAS

In the spirit of making everybody wait for everything, I'll get to the surround mixes shortly. But first, I'll dispose with the DVD bonuses. Because some of them are disposable.

Let me rephrase that: Some of them are repetitive. Meaning that, if you're a committed Genesis fan, you probably already have the 13 bonus tracks on their original sources: the EPs Spot the Pigeon and 3x3 plus various B-sides. Or you have 11 of them on the 2000 boxed set Genesis Archive #2: 1976-1992. You also have the 13 videoclips on the 2005 DVD compilation The Video Show, which previewed the surround mixes heard here (just as the same year's two-CD Platinum Collection previewed the stereo remixes).

And as you know, the bonus tracks are (and always have been) a mixed bag. Sure, "Paperlate" is great, but half of the tracks tend to pass by without notice. That said, the music-hall "Pigeons," the shimmery "It's Yourself," and the subtle-to-furious "Inside and Out" are keepers. (They're all from 1977, though you wouldn't know it from the Extra Tracks lineup, as these bonuses are unnecessarily split up and scattered nonchronologically.) And the two non-Archive tracks, the tough/breezy "Match of the Day" and the Bandesque "Me and Virgil," are welcome, too - certainly more welcome than suggested by the set's liner-notes writer, Michael Watts.

A word about those notes: disappointing. While occasionally informative, they tend to repeat comments from the onscreen band interviews. Elsewhere, they're by turns haughty ("soi-disant," "memento mori," "coup de theatre") and trite ("The genesis of Genesis," "Never Mind the Bollocks it ain't"). Fans of the band will take a dim view of Watts using the words "often bewildering, windy" to describe much of its pre-Trick work. And fans of progressive rock in general will groan at the typically shallow assessment that opens the notes, concluding with this whopper: "In the end, Spinal Tap held the genre up to fatal ridicule." Uh, no, that genre would be called heavy metal. Which isn't dead yet either, last I checked.