THE JETHRO TULL CHRISTMAS ALBUM

As I listened to this album for the first time, my main complaint was not the songwriting, the performances, or even the arrangements. It was that darned modern studio "sheen" that somehow robs so many latter-day efforts of some of their worth. Especially since most of the instrumentation is acoustic!!! The road to perfection, Ian, is sometimes not so obvious. I suspect that with all the digital editing and such, a good bit of reverb was needed to cover up the tweaking and fix-it-in-the-mixing (this coming from someone who's got over 25 years' experience in recording studios). And of course, the musicians were never all in the same studio at the same time. That said, there are still some fine songs here, and I don't even think about the fact that there's an Xmas theme. Crappy cover; maybe that was done on purpose to recall cheap, drab artwork of yore? I agree with the AMG reviewer, who said it was the best studio album by Tull in years.