Somewhere in your own music collection, you have one of these.
\nIt’s an album which you purchased with the high hopes of being one
\nyou’d enjoy for years and years — that is, until you removed the
\nshrink-wrap and started to play it. Shocked and disgusted by what
\nyou heard, you filed the disc away deep into your collection, only
\nto be pulled out again at your next garage sale.<\/p>\n
The first time I ever heard
\nA Passion Play<\/i>, the 1973 debacle from Jethro Tull, I was so
\ndisappointed with my copy that I quickly filed the cassette away
\nand never listened to it again. But, as we’ve been working on a
\nJethro Tull retrospective of late, I pulled it out to give it
\nanother chance some 12 years after I first bought it. After all, I
\nthought, I hadn’t liked
\nThick As A Brick<\/i> when I first heard it, and my opinion on
\nthat album changed. Why couldn’t the same be said for
\nA Passion Play<\/i>?<\/p>\n
The sad fact is, it can’t.<\/p>\n
Taking a second stab at a concept album, Ian Anderson and
\ncompany come up with a disjointed, uneven attempt at music which
\nbounces around styles more than a superball. Add into this the
\nextremely dumb idea of inserting a pseudo-children’s story in the
\nmiddle of the piece, and you have easily the worst release Jethro
\nTull had cranked out to this point.<\/p>\n
Now, I do have to concede that, when I first bought this one, I
\nhad some higher hopes for it. I was familiar with one portion of
\nthe piece — a selection now known as “Overseer Overture” — from
\nmy exposure to
\nM.U.: The Best Of Jethro Tull<\/i>. It was different, I conceded,
\nbut it spurred my interest in hearing the whole album.<\/p>\n
And I also have to concede that, aside from a rather slow-paced
\nopening, the almost hymn-like qualities of the main musical theme
\nproves to be nearly hypnotic. So far, one thinks, so good — and
\nmaybe my harsh critique of this one from over a decade ago will
\nsoon dissolve.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for Anderson and crew, this is where the praise
\nstops.
\nA Passion Play<\/i> quickly melts into a thrown-together mess
\nfeaturing a story line so confusing that you need Cliff’s Notes, a
\nmap and a GPS navigation system just to follow along, and musical
\nthemes which sound like they were developed just before hitting the
\n“record” button in the control room.<\/p>\n
And then, there is “The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His
\nSpectacles” — a piece which was supposed to divide the two sides
\nof the album, but turns into one tremendous landmine. In the
\noff-chance that Ian Anderson is reading this humble review, I have
\nbut one question: WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?!? Throwing this
\ncow-pie into a musical creation already collapsing upon itself is
\nthe equivalent of driving on the Autobahn and slamming on the
\nbrakes — or better yet, suddenly throwing the car in reverse. Bad
\nmove, amigo.<\/p>\n
The sad fact is that
\nA Passion Play<\/i>, already suffering from underdevelopment
\nmusically to this point, never regains any of the tenuous footing
\nit previously had following this A.A. Milne-meets-bad-acid trip.
\nEven the two pieces that listeners may be familiar with (both
\ncourtesy of the early greatest hits packages) fail to re-light a
\nfire musically.<\/p>\n
\nA Passion Play<\/i> has precious few moments of hope in the first
\nfive minutes of the work, but the second attempt at a Jethro Tull
\nconcept album quickly collapses like a house of cards in a
\nhurricane. No Jethro Tull album I’ve heard in all of my years of
\nlistening to their music deserves to be crucified as much as this
\none.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26752,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5643],"rating":[11203],"class_list":["post-38018","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-jethro-tull","rating-rating-d-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=38018"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=38018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}