Re: OT: Thick as a Brick (the oddity of)
Posted by:
RollingFreak
()
Date: July 17, 2024 01:02
I literally just listened to this, and A Passion Play over the last two mornings on my drive into work.
As a big early Jethro Tull fan, to me Thick represents the end of that great run. You had This Was, which was great blues rock, different than what they become. You had Benefit, which was good, though I've always thought uneven. Anchored by some few choice songs. You had Stand Up, a truly great underrated album IMO. Bouree is known, A New Day Yesterday was always a part of their set, but We Used To Know, Reason For Waiting, Look Into The Sun, Fat Man. A really great album thats not talked about enough. Then it all culminates with Aqualung, which is unequivocally fantastic. They'd nailed the formula and it just sounds so effortlessly perfect, every song, even the nonhits. They'd elevated.
So expectations were high for Thick As A Brick. To me, after listening many many times in my life, it's ultimately bloated nonsense. There are good ideas, that are just lengthened and expanded to fill time to the point that it kinda ruins the quality of them. It starts out strong with Thick As A Brick but it goes down swiftly from there. Poet and the Painter and Childhood Heroes show there are good ideas present, but everything feels like its just there to fill out the side. I'd say it feels all made up on the spot, but obviously careful planning and construction was done. But it just felt like everything they'd perfected with Aqualung was then amplified and brought to a meandering place with Thick. I don't say its worthless, I still have it as the end of that "that" era of the band, but if I were being honest about it there isn't a ton I'd recommend, not in the way I would their albums before.
A Passion Play is worse, though even they wouldn't argue otherwise. It just feels like for two albums Jethro Tull, of all bands at that time, felt they could do WHATEVER they wanted to fill out two album sides and it kinda undid them for me. After that, I never really got back on board. It feels like A Passion Play was just more of the same as Thick, but worse. It just goes everywhere, never compellingly, and there's even that ridiculous story in the middle. That and Thick are two albums where I wonder if the "album format side limits" helped or hurt them. Clearly they had to get to 20 minutes each side, but would there have been a more concise message without limits. Hopefully it wouldn't have gone in the other direction and gotten more aimless.
But yeah, to me Thick is a cool experiment with mixed to negative results to me. I keep it on my iPod cause I've already cut up the songs into separate tracks (@#$%& them, its not all one long song) and I can't find that anywhere else (I think the newest remaster had it), so its more for posterity than anything else. But yeah, it always feels like it should be better, but they bought full on into a concept that I'm not even sure they understood. Praise where praise is due, they went full force and the liner notes and whole story behind it is impressive commitment, but its never made the album better for me. The biggest fault I have with it is it followed Aqualung, so I can't even accuse them of not knowing what "good" material is. IMO they just got lazy with editing or started to believe their own hype.