PROG FOLK

I'll save my general-anti-Christmas-music screed for another essay.

If any rock band could pull off a good Christmas album, it would be these guys, particularly if they leaned into their folk side. And that's exactly what they did. Stylistically, this album is akin to Songs from the Wood or Heavy Horses. Jethro Tull played up their folk past, and it sounds like they had fun recording this music.

The Jethro Tull Christmas Album is a weird release, not solely due to its subject material, but also because of its specific contents. Seven of the 16 songs are rerecordings of  previously-released Tull material. And four of those aren't even Christmas-themed. Three are sorta-winter-themed, which is close enough, I guess. But then "Bourée" is tacked on here for some reason. "Bourée" is also the only rerecording with any significant differences from the original. It retains its jazzy character, but Anderson's flutework is more refined, and the accordion adds a unique twist. (The original is still superior, though.)

Of the other nine songs on the album, only four are entirely new compositions. The opening "Birthday Card at Christmas" is one of those new compositions. Written for one of Ian Anderson's daughters, who has a birthday near Christmas, it's a refreshing return to form for Jethro Tull. It's a well-written, high-energy piece of folk rock which would have fit in on any of Tull's late '70s releases. "Last Man at the Party" is lightweight folk-rock that's carried by accordion and mandolin. It's another sign that Ian Anderson had gotten his compositional mojo back (mostly). "First snow on Brooklyn" is a saccharine folk ballad I'm not fond of, but "A Winter Snowscape" is a lovely instrumental written by guitarist Martin Barre. It's a great way to close out the album.

The other five songs here are instrumental arrangements of other pieces of Christmas(-ish) music. "Holly Herald" is a jovial medley of assorted yuletide pieces. The flute, accordion, and acoustic guitar have great interplay, while the rhythm section keeps it bouncing along. "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" gets the "Bourée" treatment, in that it's been given a very jazzy interpretation. It's so jazzy, in fact, that when anything other than Ian Anderson's flute gets the lead, it borders on elevator music. It's a bit more dynamic and interesting than that, but the sound palette is awfully close.

"Pavane" is a take on a piece of music by French composer Gabriel Fauré. Some moments in here remind me a lot of Tull's glory years in the early '70s in how the flute and organ play off one another. "Greensleeved" (Anderson's arrangement of "Greensleeves") once more veers into jazz territory. "We Five Kings" (guess which Christmas hymn this is a rearrangement of) is probably the least-adventurous of these five songs, staying firmly in the album's folk-jazz lane, but it's still nice.

The Jethro Tull Christmas Album would wind up being Jethro Tull's last studio album. While I'm a bit disappointed they stopped recording, I am glad they were able to go out on a pretty strong note.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

The opening "Spiral" is a pretty decent hard rock song, but it establishes a recurrent issue on this album. There's almost nothing about it that stands out. It's an enjoyable four minutes, but once it's over, the song does nothing to stick in your memory. "AWOL", "Hunt by Numbers", and "Black Mamba" all suffer from this very issue.

"Hot Mango Flush" is a song that does stick out, however, primarily from its sheer weirdness. It has a jumpy, tropical feel, and Ian Anderson seems to be channeling Fred Schneider of the B-52s in his half-spoken vocal delivery.

The title track features the most overt Indian flavors on the album, enhanced through the heretofore-unheard-of use of a guest vocalist. Such influences pop up elsewhere on the album, including rather heavy-handedly on both "El Niño" (which also features Martin Barre's most metallic guitar riff ever in the chorus) and the aforementioned "Black Mamba".

Dot Com ends on its two strongest tracks. "The Dog-Ear Years" Sounds like it could have been on War Child, due to its overt folkiness and dashes of saxophone. "A Gift of Roses" is in a similar mold. It's less proggy in its structure and instrumentation. It's a pretty straightforward song, but the melody is strong, and the accordion was a smart addition. (The original CD release also contains the title track of Ian Anderson's then-forthcoming solo album The Secret Language of Birds as a hidden track after this song.) These two songs demonstrate that folky, proggy hard rock was Jethro Tull's strong suit.

Unlike a lot of previous Jethro Tull albums, I'm not sure there are any songs on this album I'd describe as "bad," per se. It's all enjoyable (even if the album is about ten minutes too long), but so little of it stands out in any significant way. It feels so ephemeral.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

The music here was strongly influenced by a trip Ian Anderson took to India. Assorted "Eastern" motifs crop up all over this album. Anderson also seems to have regained some musical ambition on this album. Some hints of the band's prog-rock past are detectable. Aiding this is the fact that Anderson continued to adjust his limited vocal range. He (mostly) doesn't sound strained and works well within his limitations.

The title track opens the album with an immediately-evident shift in sound. A distorted riff builds gently, and Anderson's flute playing has taken on a different, more delicate quality. The calm verses segue smoothly into higher-energy choruses. Andy Giddings is a massive improvement over past releases where Anderson was in charge of the keys. His synth tones are smart and complementary. (Note: Giddings did contribute on a few songs on Catfish Rising.)

"Rare and Precious Chain" draws heavily from "world" music, that vaguely-"Eastern" genre of easy-listening ambiance which saw a spike in popularity in the 1990s. But while the synth tones or Indian scales may not have aged super-well, this is still an enjoyable mixture of those influences with unusual progressive rock riffs. It just very much sounds of its era.

Roots to Branches thrives on songs like "Rare and Precious Chain". "Valley" is another strong synthesis of progressive rock and "world music". The alternating lightweight acoustic moments and bluesy, electric riffs work together shockingly well. "Dangerous Veils" continues the successful streak. It contains one of Anderson's best flute lines, coupled with an engaging melody in the chorus. The solo in this song doesn't quite work, though. The jazziness is out-of-nowhere and incongruous.

Not everything on this album is great. "This Free Will" is one of the less-successful songs on Roots to Branches. It feels like something that could have been on Catfish Rising, but they decided to tack on some "Eastern" aesthetics, via the strings and mock-shehnai synthesizer. "At Last Forever" drags on for far too long, does far too little, and the vocals are far too dramatic.

"Wounded, Old and Treacherous" is my personal favorite on this album. This is their best song since "Black Sunday" off A, way back in 1980. It's slow-building with a fun, jazzy backbone, and Anderson wrote some clever lyrics for the first time in a long time.

Ian Anderson has compared Roots to Branches to Stand Up, and I can agree with him to a degree. Stand Up is the unquestionably stronger album, but both albums feature a wide swathe of often-incongruous musical influences that the band somehow made work. These two albums also stand in sharp contrast with both their respective predecessors.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

Ian Anderson seems to have finally accepted that his vocal range was more limited by this point, and this album has his best vocal performance since before his throat surgery. The band members also sound like they're having fun and not just passionlessly laying down bland hard rock (see: Rock Island). They're just having fun playing bland, bluesy hard rock. It's not much of a difference, but it does have something of a positive effect.

A few songs on Catfish Rising are alright, and upon listening to this album for the first time since high school, I found it to be less intolerable than I recalled. I still wouldn't recommend it, but it's not some flaming catastrophe. "Still Loving You Tonight" is an okay blues ballad featuring some nice Spanish flavors in the acoustic guitarwork. "Sparrow on the Schoolyard Wall" is surprisingly fun, and "Gold-Tipped Boots, Black Jacket and Tie" is a return to short-form, jolly folk numbers. As much as the blues permeate this record, it's the mandolin and folk influences that provide the best moments.

Despite those few highlights, Catfish Rising still brims with dragging, unimpressive hard rock. "This Is Not Love", the album's opening track, shows that Tull still liked doing Mark Knopfler knock-offs (Knock-pfloffs? Knopfl-offs?). "Rocks on the Road" is a tepid, slow-moving number that sounds like an alternate take of "Farm on the Freeway". "White Innocence" lacks a single original thought and drags on for nearly eight minutes. It's maddeningly repetitious, and the piano tones are terrible.

"Like a Tall, Thin Girl", however, may be the single-worst song Jethro Tull ever recorded. I'm not a lyrics guy. I don't focus on them, and I'm usually pretty good at zoning them out and enjoying the music by itself. But these lyrics are really, really, unignorably terrible. Ian Anderson's vocal delivery is also reminiscent of his work on Crest of a Knave. It's strained and nasal and grating to no end. I'm just glad this song is only three-and-a-half minutes long.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

Almost nothing on this album stands out. Martin Barre's riffs are achingly generic, Ian Anderson's voice is even worse than on Crest, and the playing itself feels lifeless, flat, and completely joyless. There's more offensively dull balladry, and Anderson's lyrics continue to be awful. It doesn't take very long for me to reach a point where I struggle to write about this album. The Dire Straits comparison I used above is still applicable here, though Tull don't pull that sound off half as well as Mr. Knopfler.

The only song of note here is the title track. It reminds me of "Budapest", but it's shortened to a more reasonable seven-minute length. And where "Budapest" wallowed in sappy balladry, "Rock Island" feels more like a slow-building hard rock song. The song's intensity ebbs and flows effectively, and folk flourishes are deployed to great effect. The instrumental moments here are also the strongest on the album, though some of Barre's soloing does get cheesy and overwrought.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

On Crest, Jethro Tull retreated from the keyboard-forward sound of Under Wraps and reestablished themselves a hard rock act. It should be noted that I dislike most 1980s hard rock, as I often find it cheesy, vapid, uninteresting,. It's just not my music.

On Crest of a Knave, Ian Anderson's weakened voice is immediately evident on the opening "Steel Monkey". Despite that, this is my favorite song on the album. It's a capable hard rock number with strong melodies, aggressive sequenced synthesizers, and some great guitarwork from Martin Barre.

I'm considerably less enthusiastic about the rest of Crest of a Knave. "Farm on the Freeway" is an alright song. "Alright" is a great way to describe this whole album. It's far from good, but it doesn't do much to actively offend. "Jump Start" continues this trend of the music being just alright. It's notable in that Jethro Tull are once again exhibiting some folk influences on it, and Ian Anderson's got a pretty good flute solo.

Crest of a Knave also demonstrates that Jethro Tull were not well-suited for 1980s hard rock ballads. "She Said She Was a Dancer" has eyeroll-inducing lyrics (which have aged terribly with the end of the Cold War), the jazzy tones on the guitar do not work at all, and Anderson's intonation is downright irritating.

"Budapest" is an interminable 10-minute slog which opens with more overwrought balladry backed by unimpressive bluesy guitar noodling. The middle instrumental section is this song's sole positive. Barre and Anderson have some good interplay in their solos, and the organ has some actual impact. But then the vocals come back with more inanity for a very long final four minutes.

The album closes fairly strong, with a pair of decent hard rockers. Though the final song, "Raising Steam", sounds like a Dire Straits song. Everything from Martin Barre's guitar riff to the synths to Anderson's vocals are reminiscent of something Mark Knopfler would have done.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

It's worth mentioning that the original vinyl release had a slightly different track listing than the CD I grew accustomed to hearing. "Tundra" was added right smack dab in the middle of the album (being inserted as song #7, on what was originally an 11-song album).

The album opens with electric percussion, a sharp break with Jethro Tull's usual sound. "Lap of Luxury" is a decent hard rock song, featuring a panoply of keys, and "Under Wraps #1" is one of the best songs on the album with its driving main synth line, dark atmosphere, and surprisingly catchy chorus. "Heat" is the best song here. It's a tense, high-energy piece that lets Martin Barre finally have something interesting to do, and Peter-John Vettese's synthesizers (mostly) still sound great.

Under Wraps is also notable for how thoroughly Jethro Tull divorced themselves from folk influences. The occasional flash shows up here and there, like the Spanish-flavored guitar on "European Legacy" or the brief "Under Wraps #2". But the electronics truly take center stage, drowning out many of the band's longstanding tendencies.

Not everything on this album is great, and it does deserve some of the flak it gets. The aforementioned "European Legacy" is an awkward integration of electronics and folk. "Saboteur" has some pretty unfortunate synth brass tones, and "Astronomy" is just not a good song, being a bizarre mishmash of uplifting verses, minor-key choruses, and some of Ian Anderson's worst vocal flourishes. "Nobody's Car" has a main guitar line that sounds like a half-assed Alex Lifeson ripoff, coupled with more terrible '80s synth brass.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

Some folk influences still made their way onto this release, however. "Clasp", for example, has flashes of flute and mandolin amid Vangelis-like synthesizers and some uninteresting hard rock. "Fallen on Hard Times" is a more thoroughly folky song, sounding almost like it could have been an outtake from Heavy Horses.

It's not that The Broadsword and the Beast is without enjoyable music. "Broadsword" is an engaging, slow-building piece where Vettese's synths add effective atmosphere. Martin Barre's soloing is also quite good here. "Seal Driver" is another of the better songs, featuring an especially strong performance from bassist Dave Pegg.

Overall, though, this album feels like foreshadowing for Jethro Tull's later-80s output of Crest of a Knave and Rock Island. Before they went there, however, Ian Anderson really wanted to embrace the electronic side of 1980s rock music.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

"Black Sunday" is easily the best song on A. It opens with a Rick Wakeman-like synthesizer flourish before moving into a heavier riff, pushed along by flute and pounding bass piano. The minor key verses and paranoid lyrics add to the oppressive atmosphere. Piano lines glimmer in sharp contrast to Martin Barre's dark guitar licks.

On a few songs, Eddie Jobson busts out his electric violin, adding some folk flavors which somehow meld with the slick 1980s sound. It adds power to the main riff in "Uniform", which sounds like a futuristic version of something that could have been on Songs from the Wood. "The Pine Marten's Jig" is a high-energy instrumental where the violin and flute duel it out over mandolin. It's like the 1980s and Celtic folk had a baby. This song also features a springy bass tone that I wish Dave Pegg would have utilized more often.

Not everything on A works, though. "Working John, Working Joe" has a weird, unengaging main riff and chorus, and it drags on for far too long. "4.W.D (Low Ratio)" suffers from a similarly weak main theme, including an unsuccessful blues infusion. The vocoder is borderline-abused on this track as well. The closing ballad "And Further On" is pretty enough, but the first half or so is awfully dull.

Following the tour (which featured the band in some rather silly white jumpsuits), Jobson (who had never intended to stick around long) and Craney left the band. Replacing these two were Peter-John Vettese and Gerry Conway, respectively.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/

This music on this album is suitably grim. It retains a lot of the folk inflections of the two preceding releases, but Martin Barre's guitar looms larger and more ominously. John Evan's organ and Dee Palmer's synths add to this oppressive atmosphere. The opening "North Sea Oil" encapsulates this aspect perfectly. It's a song addressing Britain's dire economic straits with an edgy, anxious minor-key riff.

Even calmer, folky moments, like "Home", have a certain downbeat atmosphere about them. Anderson's plaintive singing is enhanced by a mournful string arrangement and some downright-morose electric guitar lines.

"Dark Ages" is, for my money, Jethro Tull's last true epic. It's a complex, multi-parted song that weaponizes the darkness of the music to build a driving, emotive monster of a song.

There's no neat way of fitting this in, but the remastered release of this album features a song called "King Henry's Madrigal". It's a rendition of "Pastime with Good Company", written by King Henry VIII. I'm pretty sure that makes this the single-most British piece of music ever recorded, and I'm also pretty sure that if you drink a pint of British beer while listening to this, you're granted automatic UK citizenship. (I wouldn't know, as being the snob I am, I drink only Northwestern IPAs with enough hops to kill a medium-sized mammal.)

Stormwatch marked the end of an era for Jethro Tull. Following this album their sound would change dramatically, and the overall quality of music would take a downward turn, though they still had a few good albums in them. For four of Jethro Tull's six members, this would be their last release with the band.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/