THE VERY BEST OF JETHRO TULL

Listening to this Jethro Tull compilation is like drinking bottle after bottle of stale beer. The drinker may feel pleasant and warm inside (or even drunk with glee), but the overall experience leaves a fair bit to be desired. Ian Anderson himself lamented on the limitations of putting together such an album (cocky fellow that he is- that's just a joke folks): In the notes he essentially questioned how one can distill his life's career into less than eighty minutes, and what's more, should one focus on one's most celebrated works or take a more expansive approach? True fans will likely see the futility in this, but will accept the limitations, no matter how begrudgingly, especially when it comes to drawing in fresh meat! After all, this was my first Jethro Tull "album," at a time when all I knew about the band was what I heard on the radio. In fact, until I came upon a certain website that had a certain album as its number one album of all time, I never would have considered Jethro Tull to be a progressive rock band by any stretch of the imagination (but at the time, I thought the same of Genesis, so there we are). I honestly believed that "Thick as a Brick" was a pithy little acoustic song! Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it came from an album that consists of two twenty-minute tracks! One realizes that it is inappropriate to exclude "Thick as a Brick" from something deemed "the very best of Jethro Tull," and yet it is an insult to the composition itself to include a measly three minutes of it. In fact, a few of the entries are truncated in a humane but simultaneously castrating manner. However, this exists as a promising and somewhat career-spanning compilation that should impress casual fans, but could have done a better job at least pointing out that there is so much more...A Passion Play, anyone?