It has great songs on it. I love it too, but I just love others more. My ranking, today, would look like this. After the first four they change depending on what I’m listening to.
Note, I only followed Genesis up to and including Abacab, but its low ranking doesn’t mean much. I love it too. I love them all. I only stopped listening to them because my tastes changed, I started listening to more female vocalists, then I had a radio show that featured only female vocalists, so that’s what I was listening to almost all the time. I kept up with Peter Gabriel though.
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
Foxtrot
Selling England By The Pound
Wind And Wuthering
Trick Of The Tail
Duke
And Then There Were Three
Nursery Cryme
Trespass
Abacab
From Genesis To Revelation
It is underrated. “Down and Out” is one of their best songs, period. It’s great live too, with a dramatic opening. I also really like “Undertow”, “Many Too Many”, “Burning Rope” and “Deep in the Motherlode”. The most well-known song on it, “Follow You, Follow Me”, is actually one of the songs that I like the least. Too soppy.
Strangely, I was only discussing this album today.
In certain moods I enjoy all of Genesis’ albums, but ATTWT sounds like a band in transition without the grand prog of earlier albums nor the pop songcraft of Collins-led '80s Genesis. Except for a few songs, the album is quite forgettable, IMHO, and the production is kind of crap, too.
Basically, it sounds like a whole album of “All in a Mouse’s Night”, a song that is fine on Wind & Wuthering, if only because it’s followed by “Blood on the Rooftops”.
ATTWT highlights: “Down and Out”, “Undertow”, “Many Too Many”, “Follow You Follow Me”
Overall, I’d rank it above From Genesis to Revelation and Calling All Stations (and maybe Trespass). Selling England by the Pound is my favourite overall, and I think Duke is the best prog the Banks/Collins/Rutherford trio released.
My desert island Genesis CD, hands down.
Even the two outtake tracks, **Vancouver **and The Day the Light Went Out, are outstanding. I cut a new version of this CD with those two tracks mixed in.
This is the album that made long-time Genesis (including Gabriel era) fans cringe when it first came out. They might has well as named it “The No Steve Hackett Nor Peter Gabriel They’re Doomed” album. But on the other hand, it is also the album that brought the band to a much wider audience, and thus paved the way for all the success they enjoyed in the 1980’s.
I still like it, and pull it out once in a while. Musically, it cannot compare to much of their earlier work, but they were clearly moving away from that kind of sound.
Musically, it was great. Lyrically…not so much. Down and Out and Deep in the Mother lode are still favorites but this one falls in the middle of the Genesis catalog.
While it has some tracks I find appealing, this one is down near the bottom. The trio could make what I consider good music, but it was hit or miss, and to my taste, there were more misses per album than the 4 and 5 member lineups, and when they missed, they missed farther than before.
I consider And Then There Were Three to be a brilliant album, plain and simple. It really doesn’t deserve the grief it gets, and it shouldn’t be lumped together with 1978’s other prog offerings (namely, Tormato and Love Beach).
I would argue that there are no weak songs on the album, although Scenes From A Night’s Dream maybe should have been issued as a B-side. I agree that ATTW3 may not be the best Genesis album, but even when they’re not a full strength, Genesis are still pretty awesome.
I like some of the songs, my favorite is The Lady Lies. The keyboards and production have a sort of ‘on steroids’ quality that I don’t particularly like, though.