Album Suggestions: Face Value

As good as Art gets

We all know that the words legend and masterpiece get thrown around way too frequently and way too casually.

But if their use has ever been justifiable, Phil Collins is one and Face Value is one.

Now, culturally speaking I didn’t experience this thing first hand, but as far as I can make of it this record stands at a significant juncture in Phil Collins’ career and life.

His first solo album, it’s a portrait of a still young artist making something wholly his own for the first time in public, away from the collaborative context of Genesis, his by-then well established and commercially successful band.

One also gets the very deep sense that this is a record that Collins simply needed to make, for both intensely personal and artistic reasons.

Having been written during (and in so many ways describing) the breakup and aftermath of a marriage, the album remains likely the most intensely personal, intimate and honest thing Collins ever produced.

While displaying hints of both in the best senses, Face Value mostly steers away from the prog rock cerebral-ism of earlier Genesis and the slicker more deliberate commercialism of his later work both with and without Genesis.

I won’t go through a narrative outlining of the songs, since the prolific Bob Lefsetz has already done so.

But I will give my own very brief overview of this hugely inspiring and musically exceptional group of songs.

The most prevalent feeling is emotional and artistic purity, clear and simple.

This impression, felt immediately upon my first listen, only gets deeper during and after each successive listen.

The record is one of a very select few that I bought on vinyl after getting a player a few years back because it’s one of those albums that I have a hard time listening to not in its entirety.

When I listen to this one it’s almost always late at night in headphones.

From a purely formal standpoint, the flow of the songs is flawless.

As with all of the greatest song-based albums of all time, there is an implicit narrative that unfolds, with respect to both theme and feeling.

And there is a brilliant dynamism that comes from the sequencing, as well as the internal peaks and valleys deftly built into each song.

Another aspect worth mentioning is that, in the truest sense of the phrase, this is a quintessential concept album.

Each and every song, part, theme, and mood relates back to the central “story” as well as integrates and interacts with each other in beautiful, unpredictable and poetic ways.

And from a purely musical / artistic point of view it’s one of those exceptionally rare combinations of the highest level of creative originality – borne out of the passion of an intense singular and absolutely deeply personal vision-expression – coupled with the most expert level of execution and musicianship.

(For those of you who aren’t very familiar with it, try and picture “so good you forget there are people actually playing it.”)

The album has some of the most excellent arrangements and sonics imaginable – thanks in no small part to legendary British engineer/producer Hugh Padgham.

Face Value also happens to feature one of the first uses of a drum machine pattern in mainstream music, certainly still one of the most iconic ever, on “In The Air Tonight”.

The song also includes a candidate for the most iconic drum fill of all time (which inspired undoubtedly the greatest TV commercial ever, over 25 years after it was played).

Simply put, this record is an individual human statement of brutal honesty, equally exquisite for its emotional complexity and depth, as for its musical richness and originality.

Suffice it to say it’s on a pretty short list of my own personal fav albums of the 20th Century.

I would highly suggest getting to know it if you don’t already.