Genesis-Wind & Wuthering (1976)

Almost at the end of 1976 Genesis would release the perhaps last great album of its progressive era, an album loaded with melancholic, nostalgic and autumnal atmospheres, a hypnotic solemn journey through that sad season of the year.
And it is in Wind & Wuthering where the post-Gabriel Genesis really begins to be born. Here you can already intuit the new musical trends of the group, and even as a Steve Hackett in full compositional and instrumental maturity, he has a greater participation, in fact almost half of the themes of this work are his authorship, but curiously it is the album where the guitars have less prominence, undoubtedly due to the final arrangements that their own colleagues imposed, precipitating that this was the last of the guitarist in the band.
Even the album cover, designed by the cartoonist of the Hipgnosis factory Colin Elgie is one of the most beautiful that has been created, it gives us a slight idea of ​​the music contained with that illusory aspect, with a gray autumn stage with a tree whose foliage turns out to be scores of birds, leaving the tree bare and alone.
This album also represented the last lyrical work with a "narrative" base that the group composed, while, with the exception of the songs Afterglow and Your Own Special Way, the songs are based on a character, or are based on a story, more than in experience.
Illusion and disappointment are the basic themes of the album. The album begins with Eleventh Earl of Mar, a song based on the Jacobi rebellion of 1715, which introduces the idea of ​​innocence (the voice of the story alternately is entirely in the third person, and is that of the protagonist's son); and of failure, in the final campaign. Musically Eleventh Earl is a powerful song that fuses electric rock and acoustic ballads very well. The song ends with the imprecation to wait, until everyone forgets, and do it again - "some things never end".
The next piece guides us perfectly to One For The Vine. This deals again with disappointment, fatalism and failure, and reinforces certain ideas related in the previous topic. The culmination, as in Eleventh Earl, presents the cyclical concept, as a final touch for this theme. The "hero" is trapped within the cycle of events described by the song - and is therefore doomed to repeat them.
Next in line comes Your Own Special Way, a song that begins with what we could now almost call the archetype of acoustic Genesis - a virtuous 12-string guitar that completely fills the song. A wonderfully moving piece brings us to Blood On The Rooftops, Hackett's first lyrical and musical entry to Wind & Wuthering. The album ends with Afterglow, a song of redemption and rebirth, in the midst of lost love. Lyrically, the simplicity of the images and the caustic intensity of the words make it one of the finest songs of Genesis.
Without a doubt this would be the last great work of Genesis and he last of his brilliant guitarist Steve Hackett, essential for any self-respecting prog collection, a masterpiece in every field, from narrative, through lyrics and music. Simply spectacular.