THICK AS A BRICK

The mad flauter had warned the press and took the world in a storm. As a spoof, this album depicts the story of a Young Poet winning some Baptist Church Contest with a brilliant but sombre poem but being disqualified by the authorities as a deranged and immoral youth when they discovered his tender of 8 and his assistant/lover a 17 years old fully developed female partner.

The music developed here is one long 43 min number cut in two for Vinyl Complications and is in the form of classical music, which might sound pretentious if it was not so tight sounding and inventive. All of the musicians are at the top of their game, every note in place and none superfluous. Right from the first few acoustic guitar notes, you know you are in the mother of all progressive trips. Those very first notes come back three times every time bringing you back to reality, but to make you sink deeper into madness. Side 1 is flawless and makes grumble as the needles lifts off the wax, that you have to get up and change side. There are some lengths on side 2 as the music becomes more difficult, but the lyrics remain astounding of reality as the Upper Class tells the Lowly Masses what is a good taste and where the Moral Melée should be, simply flabbergasting.

The only thing I ever regretted is that they never played it live as a whole, but recently I heard a bootleg pointing out that they might have done so, but the sound was just horrendous.

Get the original vinyl as the St-Cleve Chronicle newspaper: it is simply hilarious poke at the English society depicting all the quirks and quacks of rural England. It will make you want to read everything on it as they even review their own album and have created a sport halfway in between croquet and rugby and made general standings.

If one album must epitomize this site, this might be the one as the other groups were never keen on humour (Caravan and Genesis aside, Zappa being some kind of Alien)

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