HOMO ERRATICUS

As Ian Anderson explained to Billboard in 2014, "To me, Jethro Tull is...the vast body of repertoire that's Jethro Tull, the record catalog, the music, and I think that, if we look back on it, it kind of came more or less to an end during the last 10 years or so (with) a couple of live albums and a studio album of Christmas material. That might define the last albums under the name Jethro Tull. It's a body of work I rather think is now kind of historical, since the weight of it lies back in the 70s and 80s in terms of volume. And I rather think it's nice to kind of leave that as legacy."

So Tull is dead, though it truly died as a band in the conventional sense in 1979, persisting thereafter in name only as a musical prosthetic for Anderson, impersonal and robotic. This album foreshadows the musical future for Anderson post-Tull.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a flute, stamping on a human face, forever.