YMMV / The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

• Awesome Music: Pretty much the whole album, which is especially noteworthy as it's over 90 minutes long, which means that today, it can't even fit on a single CD.^note Well, not on a conventional 74-to-80-minute CD anyways; it is possible nowadays for a CD to store up to 99 minutes of uncompressed Redbook audio, and indeed you can buy 99-minute CD-Rs if you know where to look, but the music industry has stuck with the original 74/80-minute type since the format's introduction in 1982, largely because most albums even today don't come close to exceeding this limit. Keep in mind this was an album made in 1974.
• Broken Base: Phil's tendencies to repeat the phrase "down, down, down" during his renditions of the album's Title Track is pretty divisive. Some fans think it's ridiculous narm that ruins the song and others love Phil adding his own flair to the song.
• Epic Riff: Mostly on keyboards, see "In The Cage", "Back in N.Y.C.", "Carpet Crawlers", "The Raven", and "Riding the Scree".
• Funny Moments: Rael's epic fail at foreplay in "Counting Out Time", complete with awkward guitar solo.
• Hard-to-Adapt Work: The story is pretty much unfilmable; The New Yorker called it "the Ulysses of concept albums" for this reason, primarily owing to its Mind Screw plot and heavy use of surreal imagery. The album was already hard enough to adapt on stage; the associated tour required a bevy of extraordinarily elaborate effects, and at no point was all of it ever able to work as intended.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Lamia, The Slippermen, and Doktor Dyper.
  • "The Waiting Room".
• Quirky Work: The album is notoriously difficult to wrap one's head around and is full of surreal and otherwise fantastical imagery, which plays into its reputation as one of the weirdest albums in a genre already notorious for being impenetrably weird.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In an interview, Phil Collins mentioned the various technical and costume failures in an era before digital show control technology made the show unintentionally hilarious and the reason the Broadway show had a short run time. He also expressed irritation that half the time, Gabriel's costumes interfered with his singing.
  • Tony Banks is on record as saying that he doesn't think there was a single show where everything worked correctly.
• Vindicated by History: It wasn't reviewed well at the time, as it tanked on the charts and savaged by practically everybody, including the band, but it eventually went gold and became a Cult Classic. The album is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of Progressive Rock and one of the band's best recordings. Allmusic even gave it their highest rating of five stars.

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