SONGS FROM THE WOOD

Songs From the Wood ? 1977 (3.6/5) 11 ? Best Song: Cup of Wonder/The Whistler How many of you have been listening intently of Jethro Tull's career, listening to the blend of rock and folk, once and again coming across your ears with smash and vigor, only deep within yourself hoping against hop they'd turn a tail and release an album that's as fully folk as it could be ? no real rock to be seen. Well, that probably isn't going to happen anytime soon. Martin Barre needs a job, you know. But hey, this is a step forward. It's certainly a step away, that is from Too Old to Rock and Roll, which even if I disagreed with the critics at large, it was still the weakest link in the chain, yet. I'll start off simply: This album is terribly boring, terribly trivial, and terribly inoffensive. It's soft ? oh the softness! The title track is naïve enough to begin with a pseudo-alluring chant. It's a GOOD chant, but who cares? The flutes and guitars rumble along like creaking oak trees in the middle of an enchanted forest. 'Jack in the Green', along with the other songs, are quite the spectacle (oh how I didn't want to hear that word ever again), being fun and stable. Yeah, JT are a consistently well oiled machine. Even at their worst (and this is just another album in a small but growing list of mediocre records, no more boundary pushing for them), they're not terrible. This album is repetitive, but repetitively pretty. There's a lot of pop in the mix, too. 'Cup of Wonder', with its winding flute and vocal melody, hearkens back to the late 1960's again. Leaning on nostalgia already? Hey, they're better than Blackmore's Night!