STORMWATCH

Unlike the previous "Songs from the Wood" and "Heavy Horses" dedicated to vindicate the rural world over the tons of urban concrete, the obscure "Stormwatch", the twelfth album by Jethro Tull (1979), dives into global concerns more related to the sustainability of the planet, in pieces like "North Sea Oil", an agile and fluid melody dominated by Ian Anderson's flutes counterpointed by the guitars of the active Martin Barre and his sarcastic look at the effects of oil spills in the sea, or the sprawling, progressive "Dark Ages" with Barre's guitars once again taking centre stage in the myriad harmonies and shifting tempos of the icy ambient warning, or the hard-rocking simplicity of "Something's On The Move" on the irremediable, blustery arrival of the ice age that the Guardian of the Storm from the spectral graveyard of Kilmarie on the Isle of Skye (Scotland) faces in the orchestrated "Old Ghosts".

Keeping nature as a common thread, the folk nudity of Anderson's crystalline acoustic guitars accompanied by the blowing of a stirring wind and the chirping of birds in "Dun Ringill" refers to the Iron Age fort also built on the Isle of Skye, before the stories of the Hollander, a mythological ghost ship doomed to sail the seas forever, serve as the basis for John Evan's deep piano notes and Barre's distinctive mandolin playing in the slow and languid "Flying Dutchman".

And "Elegy, the melancholic and beautiful instrumental tribute dedicated to Palmer's father closes the album and, symbolically, also Jethro Tull's golden decade of the seventies.

With more sorrow and without so much glory, "Stormwatch" also implied the end of the most classic and stable line-up of the band, after the death of bassist John Glascock and the desertions of Barriemore Barlow (of impeccable work in the percussions of the album), John Evan and David Palmer. New winds would blow for Jethro Tull at the beginning of the eighties.

3/3.5 stars