THICK AS A BRICK

When I was fourteen years old I listened to LED ZEPPELIN's "Houses of the holy" for the very first time and I totally fell in love with it (that love still remain since that it is my favorite album ever); after that I started to take my dad's CD's and to listen the music he likes; I took and listened his albums of LED ZEPPELIN, THE BEATLES, THE DOORS, JIMI HENDRIX, JANIS JOPLIN, almost the entire discography of PINK FLOYD (which is my dad's favorite band), YES' "Fragile" and JETHRO TULL's "Thick as a brick". I actually heard "Aqualung" first since my mother had a (non-original) copy of it but when I finally heard this album it really blew my mind off.

At first I didn't understand why the song was divided in two separate parts but then I realized that before CD's there were LP's (a fact that I didn't know back then) but when I started to listen to the album that didn't matter to me anymore; the music was amazing, the album was different to "Aqualung" this tremendous song that goes and goes and doesn't stop but keeps increasing its intensity was absolutely incredible. I remember that I played the album like three times in a row because I couldn't believe my ears with the first listen.

Some months later I started to listen to more and more Progressive Rock bands such as KING CRIMSON, GENTLE GIANT, RUSH, GENESIS and EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER and I discovered on-line a Taringa post that was called "The 100 greatest albums of Progressive Rock" or something like that and guess what? "Thick as a brick" was the first place!! The guy who wrote the article said that his top was a modified version of ProgArchives' 100 Prog Rock top, so I discovered this website and in those days it really was the first place (I truly believe it deserves to be the first place).

There are too many albums of Progressive Rock that really deserve the highest rate of the website but I really think "Thick as a brick" is over all of the other titles. The concept is very simple: an imaginary kid who wrote a poem that was really written by Ian ANDERSON and JETHRO TULL made the music for it. The album was really thought as a parody to Progressive Rock and ironically it became one of the most solid and recognizable albums of the genre.

The music is great even when it's kind of repetitive the songs flows so naturally that it doesn't become boring, on the contrary: it keeps interesting and it is amazing that the lyrics of the song could fill a 43 minutes opus as well as they did. The five musicians of the band were in their better years (this was the first album with Barrimore BARLOW on drums replacing Clive BUNKER and he couldn't get into JETHRO TULL in such a better moment.

Even when this album is not my favorite of the entire Progressive Rock genre I do believe that this is the closest to achieve the title of "the best album of Prog". I could never rate this album with a rate under five and it is really hard to believe to me that there are people who already did that.

SONG RATING: Part one, 5 Part two, 5

AVERAGE: 5

PERCENTAGE: 100

ALBUM RATING: 5 stars

I ranked this album #4 on my TOP 100 favorite Progressive Rock albums of all time.

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