STAND UP

Out with Abrahams and in with Barre on lead. A great deal of the bluesy style of the previous album has dissipated here and the Tull start to cement together the bricks that make up their true sound. There is a lot of flute work on this album and I enjoy that side of Anderson and Tull. I don't like the distorted vocals on "Look into the Sun" but the preceding tracks were 1969 rock brilliance. I really enjoy "Fat Man" - a really fun piece of folksy rock. "We used to know" for me is like Tull's version of "House of the Rising Sun" musically. "Reasons for Waiting" is a track that I like very much for the emotion in the music and for Anderson's delivery as well as for the orchestration. The album closer "For a thousand Mothers" brings the album to close on a strong note. For me, with this album, Tull came of age with a distinctive sound which was to become theirs - nothing else in 1969 sounded the same as Tull and their music was instantly identifiable. There were better albums to come from them, in my view, however this was a really strong foundation of a second album. A solid four star album to my way of thinking.