HEAVY HORSES

I'm listening this mixed bag with a mixed emotions. It's just not that appealing to this long-time die-hard Tull fan.

What's wrong? Well, half of the album. Moths, Journeyman, Rover, Weathercock and Acres Wild. Forgettable, dull, only a shade of what Tull used to be (or will be again in years to come). Like sitting tied in a chair in the middle of the white room, while someone is talking to you, but you can't hear anything, just see the motions of the person's mouth...like a fish..open, close, open, close, struggle for the oxygen.

Occasional flashes of melody will travel from the loudspeaker through the air of the white room and enter your ear to stimulate few of your brain cells...but not nearly enough to produce a chain reaction known as "pleasure", somewhere deep behind the corpus callosum...to sum it up, two catchy melodies, one chorus, and one nice drum work is all that I can squeeze from the above mentioned songs...and unforgettable awful lyrics of "Acres Wild". Ian?!?

Four songs are balancing this record and preventing it from the disaster. The opening song, nice idea for a story, nice music, nice ending out of the song - a bit of experimentation with human voice and stereo field. "No Lullaby", 5/5 stars song, most progressive (and the least folksy) effort here. Live version from "Bursting Out" is much more memorable, though. I will forgive some stupid keyboard sounds utilised here because of complexity of the song. Plus, it sounds almost as a heavy metal epic.

"One Brown Mouse" is a gorgeous folk ballad. And it's quite pointless to describe any gorgeous folk ballads, so check it out, preferably a performance from "Bursting Out". Again.

"Heavy Horses" is another good prog folk tune, but far from the best in the band's book.

That's it. Two and a half stars. If you want to have highlights of the album in your collection, go get "Live: Bursting Out", and everything else is forgettable and only for completionists. Except maybe the "Mouse Police", but it's an acquired taste. You're buying this album at your own risk.

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