THICK AS A BRICK

This is the album when Tull became intellectual. Ian Anderson is a very bright guy, with a keen, albeit unusual, sense of humour, and from this point on would infuse each Tull album with a number of wry jokes and insights that most people wouldn't get. Lyrically, this album is presented as poem written by 8-year old Gerald Bostock which would have won a poetry contest but was disqualified. Anderson has said the album was meant as a parody of the pretentiousness of bands like ELP and Yes and their complex progressive rock epics. Yet, the lyrics were not easy to make out, and in doing so, Anderson wrote probably one of the genre's best examples of a long pretentious epic, only to be outdone in Tull's next album 'A Passion Play'! Yes, the irony. The key thing is that the music is excellent all the way through, and the lighthearted lyrics mean that while the music is so good it keeps your interest the band is not taking itself seriously. There are about 6 main themes/songs in this, but they all segue together, and the piece returns to its origins at the end. The only off-point is in the middle where the band seemingly has three false starts to a new song but then abandons it in favour of a different one (all concocted, of course). That is the only point where the musicality is interrupted, but it only lasts for half a minute. And thankfully, Anderson restrains his singing on this one, so it is not nearly as rough and annoying as on Aqualung, and indeed, this album marks the beginning of a smoother singing style for him (for all albums from this point forward). This is an album that has maintained its deep musicality over 40 years. Definitely deserves its stature in the history of progressive, and all, music. I give this 9.6 out of 10 on my 10-point scale.

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