A PASSION PLAY

Yea well the follow up to the masterpiece Thick as a brick was bound to suffer from comparisment of the previous album...Just as thick as a brick it is a concept album divided in two songs on about 20 minutes each...You could think that the music on these two albums could be pretty similar but Ian Anderson has been able to make a rather fresh sounding sound on this album experimenting further with the epic song format. However there is a fine line between trying to make original and experimental music and trying to make the best possible music, and i think especially the first song suffers from trying to hard to sound new while ending up sounding patchy and sometimes leading into nowhere...There are generally some interesting bits here and there but they get messed up into trying to sound experimental by using unusual rhytms and timechanges, although i enjoy unusual rhytms and timechanges it just sounds so patchy and unnatural it is not much to enjoy. When the song finally breaks into part two it gets alot better and the song opens up with Jeffrey Hammond reading something that seems to be a childrens story written by him and anderson...Its quite funny and the music follows the storys mood perfectly and help putting an edge into the tale. The whole story lasts for another 4 minutes before it slides into regular music with anderson and this time around the music is alot better and the music manges to stay original without loosing direction although its still pretty far from any of the songs of the thick as a brick album it is one of the better Tull songs. Im bouncing between 3 and 4 stars on this album really but i will give it 4 stars becausse i really think this is one of the top 5 Tull albums ever released.

Further investigation: Thick as a brick, Aqualung Similar Bands: For more folky stuff try Mostly Autumn or Flarick and for great 20 minute prog epics try Foxtrot :-)