Somewhere along the line, Jethro Tull albums stopped being fun. Ian Anderson discovered more and more knobs in the studio and started turning them down.
Well, they’re a live band. That statement looks pretty shaky just hanging out there, but look at the facts. As more and more annual albums roll out, more and more people nod off like they’ve been shot with bull tranquilizers, and with every tour more and more people storm into the halls of public herding around the world just to tear their clothes, bite each other’s faces and go home with wet pants.
Each year this Jekyll/Hyde studio/live dilemma becomes more acute, more pronounced, and each year Anderson does his best to make it worse. “Fuck all these critics,” he snarls, then goes out and does his damnedest to come up with something they’ll like, only most gave up on him a couple epics ago.
The same contradictions haunt their tours. On stage, Anderson’s contempt for the downed-out little suckers who raided cookie jars and lied to be there is pitifully obvious, yet no one breaks his ass more on stage, night after night until he sometimes ends up in hospitals. So, what the hell’s wrong with the guy and what’s wrong with this album?
Well--the guy, for all his pretentiousness, is a desperately sensitive kid with a universe-sized ego.
What’s wrong with the album? Well, a strong plus is the fact that it has songs on it, actual songs. This alone could make some people do backflips after the last two hour-long monsters.
But, ah, a few of the songs look curiously like Passion Play leftovers (some even mention Passion Play), which some fans can tell you may be the case, as P.P. was originally a double album of songs done right after Thick as a Brick and then discarded for various reasons.
Then there’s the lyrics. Anderson professes a love for ambiguity. So does Ron Ziegler. So, you get things like: “Scoff at the monkeys who live in their dark tents/Down by the waterhole drunk every Friday/Eating their nuts, saving their raisins for Sunday.” Which may not be bad when you look at some of the other things that can be understood all too well. There’s a line in “SeaLion” that proclaims “There is no business like the show we’re in,” then goes on to say: “The same old performance, in the same old way/It’s the same old story to this Passion Play/We’ll shoot the moon and hope to call the tune/And make no pin cushion of this big balloon.” An alternate title could be “Tull in the Studio.”
Swell. So, their studio work is buried under safe-as-milk tidal waves of mushy orchestration, and the lyrics slap the faces of their fans. What’s the solution? Buy their bootlegs. They kick ass ten times better than anything they’ve done in the past 4 years, and the band doesn’t get a penny.
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