Viewed as a recorded oratorio, or as a prolonged "single," or as any in-between hybrid,
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A Passion Play strangles under the tonnage of its pretensions—a jumble of anarchic, childishly precocious gestures that are intellectually and emotionally faithless to any idea other than their own esoteric non-logic.
Like Thick As a Brick, the aesthetic of A Passion Play is desperate zaniness, but here it is carried to even further extremes. The scenario roughly parallels the Passion of Christ. This parallel is not made half as clear in the play's gibberish, pun-laden verses and double-entendres (e.g., the playing back and forth between "be" and "bee," and in phrases like "Man/son of man") as in the album's cutesy playbill-within-record-jacket, perused in relation to its presumptuous title. If one undertakes the thankless task of unraveling the text as it coincides with the playbill, the sequence of events takes the following vague outline. Ronnie Pilgrim, a supercilious atheist, describes his own funeral, then goes through purgatory, part of which is a movie rerun of his life. He is teased by the saints who say: "Or/are we here/for the glory/for the story for the gory satisfaction of telling you how absolutely awful you really are," and then both narrates and is imaginative participant in a shaggy-dog fable, recited to film, called "The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles," which (accompanied by the album's most ponderous "incidental" music) is meant to sum up the mundanely single vision of his whole life.
There ensues a descent into hell ("a business office," according to the program), in which Anderson takes, among other roles, that of Satan, followed by a resurrection into the drawing room of a Magus Perde. I leave it for the devout Tull freak to argue the details, the myriad subtleties, contradictions and paradoxes of this banal putdown, since, to my mind, neither the text nor the music seems to justify further analysis. Except for the addition of the "Hare-Spectacles" narration, the structure of A Passion Play is as free-form as that of Thick As a Brick. In tone, it is the ultimate exaggeration of self-indulgent English whimsy, an intellectual tease inflated with portent but devoid of wonder—in its cumulative expression mean and trivial.
The only positive aspect of the album i
Yes were sleeker, Emerson Lake and Palmer were grander, and Genesis more ingenious. But Jethro Tull were the most frazzled British art rockers of their day. That is never more clear than on the flighty Aqualung, the band's biggest U.S. hit. The title piece begins with some hoary singing from frontman Ian Anderson before everything gets swept up into a fast forest groove. "Cross-Eyed Mary" ushers in the flute-over-drums textures that became a Tull hallmark; some funk anchors the verses, which dovetail into a cranky singalong chorus. There's a prevailing woodwind litheness throughout the album, cut by mad piano runs and the granite solidity of the drums. A tension is in the background - even quiet folk pieces such as "Cheap Day Return" seem to be under some kind of inescapable pressure. But it's on the hell-bent "Locomotive Breath" that Tull bring their frazzle front and center, its barrage of clip-clop rhythms doubling and tripling themselves before Anderson can glide off onto one of his harried flute excursions.
Aqualung was a bear to make, Anderson has said, because of the difficulty of hearing all the parts in a Seventies studio. Today, it's the sparse quality of Aqualung you notice - the handmade sound of a band working to convey the kind of anxiety that now gets slapped onto tape with much more booming technology but far less care.
JAMES HUNTER
(RS 879 - October 11, 2001)
