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Thus quoted Ian in the Dot Com album! What about this end of millennium work?

Four years after the stunning Roots To Branches, Jethro Tull tried again to achieve the same success. The odd title's album, derived from the URL of The Official Jethro Tull Website, once again offers an example of how Jethro Tull always chooses it's own course and manages to include and use every actual development in society to build up their sublime art. This way the band chose deliberately to inform fans and others who are interested by offering news regarding the band and their music directly. Whereas the Roots To Branches album offers us an innovative Tull, inspired by all kinds of ethnic musical influences, expressing all different moods and feelings, the new album seems to be a COMPROMISE. From one hand the album features Najma Akhtar, one of India's best known female classical and pop vocalists, who added her lovely female vocal to the beautiful soft title track; from the other hand Ian Anderson seems to return to the remembrance of some 70s "better days" composition as, for example, with A Gift Of Roses: ". I count the hours, you count the days, we count the minutes in this PASSION PLAY.".

The cover art is not of their best: a goat-headed divinity from the ancient Egypt, I think.

Spiral is about the waking-up process in which we spiral out of the dream's state into reality wondering which is the dream and what is reality. The narrator tends to waken up, but is confused (".who's out there, can't hear you."). Notable is the biblical images in this stanza: ".wine to water." and ".loaves and fishes.".

Hunt By Numbers is a hard electric guitar played song about Ian's cats. In the lyrics the moment is described when the cats are about to go out for their nightly hunting. The dark, almost brooding music evokes a threatening athmosphere. For information about Ian's hobby of breeding Bengal cats!!!

There is a slightly Caribbean feel to the music of Hot Mango Flush. Both Martin and Ian spent several holidays in the Caribbean. Ian Anderson at some crowded outdoor market in a small tropical harbour town.".wood smoke, old fish, diesel harbour.", where locals and tourists fill the small streets and look for things they fancy: ".the crowd moves like a flock of starlings.". The music is very strange (positively) and, in particular, the guitar of "Monsieur Le Barre"! This is one of my favourite songs in this 1999 album!

El Niño (Christ-child) is a word used for the warm current in the Pacific near Ecuador and Peru, that arises around Christmas. Good and interesting acoustic guitar with strong "underlining" by fiery electric guitar!

The best song here is a love song: Bends Like A Willow: beautiful! The Dog-Ear-Years and A Gift Of Roses are more than a resemblance with the Ian Anderson's solo album: The Secret Language Of Birds.

In conclusion: excellent album, not at the same level of the previous JT one (Roots To Branches), not at the same level of the next one (Christmas Album)! My personal rating: 3,5 stars! P.S. NEVER FORGET Jethro Tull!

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