BENEFIT

So, Benefit's a step up from Stand Up, but still an average album. There's simply not much here to distinguish it from dozens of other albums of the time. The best of it (With You There to Help Me, To Cry You a Song, Teacher, Sossity) is excellent, but the remainder is unremarkable and generic. The treats here are a couple of the tracks that originally appeared on the Living in the Past collection -- Singing All Day and Witch's Promise -- which are always welcome in remastered form. With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear Tull was still searching for an identity on Benefit and not really finding it. They'd take care of that soon enough. But for the most part there's very little here that is/was memorable, even back in the day. I recall buying this when it was released, listening to it incessantly for a week or two, then never really coming back to it save for the few songs mentioned. Having listened to it three or four times in the course of writing this review, I expect the same will happen now. Which, put in contemporary terms, means it's not going to be taking up a lot of space of my meager 30 GB IPod.

Docked 1/2 star for showing Ian on the cover in his one-legged 'stork' pose, which seems to have become the standard for any number of middle-aged, flute-playing street musicians.