Published on Jul 19, 2004
Somewhere in your own music collection, you have one of these.
It’s an album which you purchased with the high hopes of being one
you’d enjoy for years and years — that is, until you removed the
shrink-wrap and started to play it. Shocked and disgusted by what
you heard, you filed the disc away deep into your collection, only
to be pulled out again at your next garage sale.
The first time I ever heard
A Passion Play, the 1973 debacle from Jethro Tull, I was so
disappointed with my copy that I quickly filed the cassette away
and never listened to it again. But, as we’ve been working on a
Jethro Tull retrospective of late, I pulled it out to give it
another chance some 12 years after I first bought it. After all, I
thought, I hadn’t liked
Thick As A Brick when I first heard it, and my opinion on
that album changed. Why couldn’t the same be said for
A Passion Play?
The sad fact is, it can’t.
Taking a second stab at a concept album, Ian Anderson and
company come up with a disjointed, uneven attempt at music which
bounces around styles more than a superball. Add into this the
extremely dumb idea of inserting a pseudo-children’s story in the
middle of the piece, and you have easily the worst release Jethro
Tull had cranked out to this point.
Now, I do have to concede that, when I first bought this one, I
had some higher hopes for it. I was familiar with one portion of
the piece — a selection now known as “Overseer Overture” — from
my exposure to
M.U.: The Best Of Jethro Tull. It was different, I conceded,
but it spurred my interest in hearing the whole album.
And I also have to concede that, aside from a rather slow-paced
opening, the almost hymn-like qualities of the main musical theme
proves to be nearly hypnotic. So far, one thinks, so good — and
maybe my harsh critique of this one from over a decade ago will
soon dissolve.
Unfortunately for Anderson and crew, this is where the praise
stops.
A Passion Play quickly melts into a thrown-together mess
featuring a story line so confusing that you need Cliff’s Notes, a
map and a GPS navigation system just to follow along, and musical
themes which sound like they were developed just before hitting the
“record” button in the control room.
And then, there is “The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His
Spectacles” — a piece which was supposed to divide the two sides
of the album, but turns into one tremendous landmine. In the
off-chance that Ian Anderson is reading this humble review, I have
but one question: WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?!? Throwing this
cow-pie into a musical creation already collapsing upon itself is
the equivalent of driving on the Autobahn and slamming on the
brakes — or better yet, suddenly throwing the car in reverse. Bad
move, amigo.
The sad fact is that
A Passion Play, already suffering from underdevelopment
musically to this point, never regains any of the tenuous footing
it previously had following this A.A. Milne-meets-bad-acid trip.
Even the two pieces that listeners may be familiar with (both
courtesy of the early greatest hits packages) fail to re-light a
fire musically.
A Passion Play has precious few moments of hope in the first
five minutes of the work, but the second attempt at a Jethro Tull
concept album quickly collapses like a house of cards in a
hurricane. No Jethro Tull album I’ve heard in all of my years of
listening to their music deserves to be crucified as much as this
one.