A PASSION PLAY

It simply boggles my mind too see so much people condemning this album as their worst. I simply don't get the hatred. Surely it's not better than Thick As A Brick, but they're almost in the same vein musically-wise, with some detailed differences. I certainly find more flaws in this album than in Thick As A Brick, but it wins by very close competition and few points.

A very obvious improvement is in Ian's vocal delivery, whereas in the previous album he's voice didn't differ much from a generic Syd Barrett imitator, in this album his voice has increased in inspiration and warmth, and he modules better in a very operatic way.

Another one is in sound quality: just take the remastered version of Thick As A Brick and grab A Passion Play's remastered edition and you'll see the improvement.

I find two flaws: Particularly in the composition and in the choice of instruments. Some people call it lack of melody, but they have no idea what a melody is so I interpret it as "lack of catchy melodies"; and actually that's not what I see in the album: it certainly has various hooks throughout. The problem lies with the lack of tone variation: apart from the main theme, the song within the song are mostly presented in a G key and it hardly varies from it, making it very monotonic (especially in side B, until the Magus Perde part, where they tune down to F). But one might actually get to hear some interesting and unusual chord sequences, and in the main song they're conciously trying to avoid ending in a dominant chord until they reach from the starting minor chord to major chord of the same key, in the old baroque sort of way; it build a very complex and amazing melody. By the way: Martin really seems absent in this record; I saw a video of the Passion Play tour where he actually did an extended guitar solo. I wish they could had lit the spotlight on him a bit more on the original album.

Then there's Ian choice of introducing the sax; it's just an awful sound. I remember playing back the first Nightcap CD and my father (who is a Jazz saxophonist) couldn't tell the sax from a violin, because it sounds very synthetized; it sounds indeed like another of the many synthetizers they used on it, and that's my other complaint. Again apart from the main verse, everything else is just flooded with synthetizers, which can get annoying after a while.

that just makes a tie of flaws between the two "epics", which tells you that . Although at the same time they're very alike (it's the same Jethro Tull) the two shouldn't be taken as standard of one another, but as two different approaches, and that's the main problem with the critics: when they give you another Thick As A Brick, they complain about the carbon copy; au contraire, the despise it because it's not up to the standards of Thick As A Brick. I think it's a very good album, not better than Thick As A Brick but neither worse. Hence I give it 3.5 stars which I round to 4 in the Jethro Tull catalog.