BENEFIT

Benefit almost reaches the same heights as its predecessor. Less bluesy and opening up to more acoustic songs and folk influences, we get another inspired and passionate release, with excellent song writing and a top performance.

But for one or other reason it doesn't feel like a consistent album to me. It sounds like a compilation of songs they had lying around at that time. It lacks to coherence and unifying sound of Stand Up and there is a huge quality difference between the more accomplished longer tracks and the still adequate but less memorable short ones.

Anyway, Jethro Tull were enormously creative and inspired in their first years, especially if you also consider the amount of songs that were written in the same period but didn't make it onto one of the albums till the compilation Living in the Past was released.