HEAVY HORSES

After a few years of lukewarm albums, Songs Fom the Woods was a surprising creative peak for Tull, full of new ideas and enthusiasm for the material. One could have hoped that Heavy Horses would continue the new found creative vein for at least one other album but that was not what happened. Heavy Horse is another half-hearted Tull release with too few decent songs and a sterile performance, devoid of any emotion or excitement.

With the Mouse Police Never Sleeps, it doesn't start too bad though. It's an original little song with a biting vocal on top of some interesting percussive work. Just two songs further down, there's even a new Tull classic in the presence of No Lullaby. Not my favourite song by a long stretch but still, quite close to the stuff on Aqualung. One Brown Mouse is a nice little ditty that would have fit well on Living in the Past. But that's all folks. I can't conjure up any kind of enthusiasm at all for the remainder of the dead material on this badly dated album. Considering this is from '78, a year when the music scene in England burst with creativity and new ideas, the contrast with this muffled affair couldn't have been bigger. And things would only go further downhill from here onwards.

It's appalling how old and tired this band sounds. Not even 10 years into their career, Tull has become a dinosaur, stretching his old neck one last time to look in the sky at the meteorite that would make him and his kind extinct. Amen.