THICK AS A BRICK

Thick as a Brick was an apocryphal album for me. I actually only heard the album for the first time live in concert. I was a young boy who ended up at the Tull concert with my older sister's birthday party. At any rate, I was transfixed by the music, and the humour in TAAB.

The album opens up with a fantastic folk picking piece from Ian and then morphs into the electric jamming of Tull. Their syncopations and use of Organ and Mr. Barre's guitar are never more amazing than on this album. This album takes the gains made with Aqualung and then spins them out of orbit.

As Ian said, TAAB was designed to be the "Mother of all concept albums".

Because the album is one long song, one wonders if it holds together as such. I used to think that side two wandered a bit, but now when I listen to the album I believe that the second half needs to depart from the themes introduced on side one in order to make it that much sweeter when everything cycles back round for the conclusion.

The orchestration, the singing, the jamming, the drums, the sound, the album cover... Everything about Thick is top notch and unique and pushed the envelope of what "popular" music was at the time. Even progressive music had never seen such an audacious step. 1972 was a good year and Jethro Tull were the masters of dramatic music with a decidedly English bend.

Thank God for this album. It transformed my life, made my childhood bright and is perhaps one of the few albums I will ALWAYS come back to again and again...

I can't say the same for some of my old favourites.