HEAVY HORSES

Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs. Having recently rediscovered the weird and wonderful world of A Passion Play, I browsed through Tull's back catalogue to see if there was anything that I had been missing in the past thirty years. I plumped for this one - mainly because I liked the cover. Oops. Bad mistake. Now I remember why I stopped buying Tull records in the mid Seventies. Gone is the wry humour and the joyous bouncy bass guitar of Thick As A Brick. Gone is the gung-ho creativity and poetry of A Passion Play. The line "Fallen like angels from a far better place" now seems strangely prophetic. Heavy Horses tries so hard to be folk rock that it ends up being neither folk NOR rock. The lyrics are twee and contrived, fixated with all things rustic and rural. The bass is leaden, the lead guitar predictable (though the drums are as good as they ever were). Even the vocals, once so powerful and resonant, are annoyingly nasal and distant, like a thin pastiche of a much earlier Jethro Tull. Best track by far on the remastered CD is Broadford Bazaar, a song that wasn't even on the original vinyl album. No, if it's prog rock you want, forget this one. Me, I'll put my feet up and give A Passion Play another spin - for old times sake, of course.