THICK AS A BRICK

What this album knocks out of the park is the concept. If you ever find a vinyl copy of this, I'd consider it to be worth your while to pick up if not just for the sleeve; the whole "newspaper" is pretty clever, and an amusing read. That said, I don't listen to ambitious concepts. I listen to music. So how does the music on "Thick As A Brick" stack up? Honestly, pretty well. The music on here is a lot more complex than Jethro Tull's output usually is, and is probably the first (and one of the few) albums they put out that I would actually consider to be prog. The interplay in the band is really quite something. The music, while never getting very eclectic, is certainly erratic. Time and tempo changes galore, with saxophone, flute, Hammond organ and electric guitar licks all playing off one another. I wouldn't put their playing on the same pedestal as, say, Yes or Gentle Giant, but I'd say that it probably equals what Genesis was putting out around the same time in terms of technical prowess.

Of course, what good is technique if not but a means to convey and express? Like I said, the music on here is erratic, never standing still for too long. Oddly enough, though, it doesn't seem to cover much territory. The sound of the album never seems to change too much; it's either stuck in typical folky Ian Anderson "nonny-nonny"-type balladry, with a sprawling libretto of nonsense lyrics, or it develops into one of the complex, uptempo blues rock passages that the band uses to bridge Ian's vocal vignettes. And I think that that may be my main problem with the album; there's really a lot of potential for greatness here, but "Thick As A Brick" really suffers from being just a vehicle for Ian Anderson's own ambitions. Although it's probably part of the satire, the whole album just strikes me as unapproachable on any visceral level; it seems to just be prog for prog's sake.

Perhaps if Tull took the talent on display here and applied a more authentic, human creative vision (a la "Songs From The Wood", perhaps?), then I'd be among the vast swaths of people praising this album. But as it stands, I just can't really bring myself to enjoy "Thick As A Brick". Not that it's any loss not being able to get into this album - there were dozens of prog albums being put out the same year that blew it away in ambition, technique, innovation, emotion, eclecticism, or often many of these at the same time. This just happened to be one of the more famous ones. So while I wouldn't consider "Thick As A Brick" to be a bad album, I wouldn't consider it essential by any means, and there are hundreds of albums that I'd recommend over it. 3 stars.

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