UNDER WRAPS

Their next album, 1984's Under Wraps, is where I disagree with fan orthodoxy the most. This is their lowest-rated album on the sites Rate Your Music and Prog Archives, but I think it's pretty good. Yes, Ian Anderson's flute is minimized; and yes, this at times resembles Thomas Dolby; and yes, they used a drum machine instead of a live drummer for this album. But the compositions here are stronger than people give them credit for. It's also notable for how much collaboration occurred in the songwriting. Anderson only penned four songs on his own, with keyboardist Vettese contributing to the others.

It's worth mentioning that the original vinyl release had a slightly different track listing than the CD I grew accustomed to hearing. "Tundra" was added right smack dab in the middle of the album (being inserted as song #7, on what was originally an 11-song album).

The album opens with electric percussion, a sharp break with Jethro Tull's usual sound. "Lap of Luxury" is a decent hard rock song, featuring a panoply of keys, and "Under Wraps #1" is one of the best songs on the album with its driving main synth line, dark atmosphere, and surprisingly catchy chorus. "Heat" is the best song here. It's a tense, high-energy piece that lets Martin Barre finally have something interesting to do, and Peter-John Vettese's synthesizers (mostly) still sound great.

Under Wraps is also notable for how thoroughly Jethro Tull divorced themselves from folk influences. The occasional flash shows up here and there, like the Spanish-flavored guitar on "European Legacy" or the brief "Under Wraps #2". But the electronics truly take center stage, drowning out many of the band's longstanding tendencies.

Not everything on this album is great, and it does deserve some of the flak it gets. The aforementioned "European Legacy" is an awkward integration of electronics and folk. "Saboteur" has some pretty unfortunate synth brass tones, and "Astronomy" is just not a good song, being a bizarre mishmash of uplifting verses, minor-key choruses, and some of Ian Anderson's worst vocal flourishes. "Nobody's Car" has a main guitar line that sounds like a half-assed Alex Lifeson ripoff, coupled with more terrible '80s synth brass.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2019/07/25/deep-dive-jethro-tull/