A

Jethro Tull's A is an album which gets a bit of a raw deal, largely because it infamously wasn't conceived as a Jethro Tull album - it's an Ian Anderson album which got rebranded as a Tull release, at a time when the Tull lineup was in flux. As such it doesn't really sound like the famed "folk rock trilogy" which preceded it or the following Broadsword and the Beast, and I suspect many are turned off by the extra electronic sheen brought to the table by Eddie Jobson on keyboards.

However, if you take the sideways step to think of it less as a Jethro Tull album with an uncharacteristic sound and more as, say, a mashup of late-1970s Tull and Danger Money-era UK, it works much better. And when you dig into the album you can find more material which belies its reputation as a synth-soaked disaster like The Pine Marten's Jig, which could have sat happily on Songs From the Wood on Heavy Horses without raising any eyebrows (and has some grand violin work from Jobson enhancing the folk-prog sound). (And then the following song, And Further On, opens with a synth line which is so vivid of UK, it's almost a surprise when Ian Anderson starts singing instead of John Wetton.)

Perhaps it's the 1980s synths, which tend to get a bit of a bad rap from prog fans - but as someone who absolutely doesn't mind them (and indeed considers them aesthetically interesting in their own right so long as you don't go in expecting them to replicate the sound of 1970s analogue synths), I find there's a lot to like about A. In fact, I think it sounds considerably fresher than Stormwatch - it's certainly took me a while for me to warm to that one, whilst I was quite taken with A from the first listen.