Squonk

The Squonk is a creature from Pennsylvania folklore so wretched in appearance that it hides in hemlock forests and weeps. If you manage to capture one, it dissolves into a pool of bubbles and tears. Genesis, on their first album without Peter Gabriel, chose this myth as their subject and built around it the hardest, most relentless piece they had recorded. Tony Banks's piano riff is the engine: angular, driving, nearly mechanical in its insistence. Phil Collins, newly installed as lead vocalist, delivers the narrative with a directness that suits the material — less theatrical than Gabriel, more physical, the voice of someone who has actually been running through the woods. Mike Rutherford's bass lines are prominent and aggressive, pushing the song forward with an urgency that does not let up. The music conveys pursuit — breathless, determined, slightly manic — and when the ending arrives, the creature's dissolution feels both inevitable and strangely sad. There is something in the Squonk that reads as a metaphor for the uncapturable, for grief or beauty or the thing you want so badly that the wanting itself destroys it. "A Trick of the Tail" is often called the album where Genesis proved they could survive their own upheaval, and this opening track announces that survival loudly, with clenched fists.