TOO OLD TO ROCK 'N' ROLL: TOO YOUNG TO DIE!

Like War Child before it, Too Old to Rock isn't an outright incompetent album - it just suffers from a scarcity of ideas and a feeling that the band are just blindly going through the motions. Those who particularly miss the more straight-ahead folk-rock of the group's early days might get some enjoyment out of some of the material here, but not as much if they just relistened to Stand Up or Benefit, and coming after as inventive and playful an album as Minstrel In the Gallery it's a major disappointment. The performances on the album sound subdued and unenthusiastic to my ears, suggesting that the band were taking at least the first part of the album title to heart, and whilst there's some pathos to be had in the story of an old rocker feeling left behind by the passage of time, the best material here got better outings live. It's not terrible - this is 1970s Jethro Tull, after all, they're never less than OK - but it's not what it could have been.