Published on Jul 28, 2004
The passage of time has not been particularly kind to Jethro
Tull.
While Ian Anderson and crew declared back in 1976 they were
Too Old To Rock ‘N’ Roll: Too Young To Die, the band did
indeed rock to their own beat, and did so, more or less,
successfully for about 20 years. But as the ’80s came to a close,
Jethro Tull found themselves more adrift in a sea of genre
pigeonholing than they ever had found themselves — a situation not
made any easier by their winning the first Grammy for a hard
rock/heavy metal performance.
Rock Island, the 1989 effort from Jethro Tull, features the
band trying to continue in the vein they mined on
Crest Of A Knave, but the results are far more disappointing
this time around.
Whereas most Jethro Tull albums have at least one song you can
walk away from whistling, none of the 10 songs on this disc stand
out as being exceptional. In fact, the whole vibe of the disc can
be summed up in one word: blah. It was almost as if Anderson and
company chose to just put something out to keep their name in front
of the fans, some of whom may have been gathering due to curiosity
from their Grammy win. Instead of building on the successes on
Crest Of A Knave (and there were indeed successes on that
album),
Rock Island has the feel of tracks which didn’t make the cut
the first time around — and, in fact, never should have seen the
light of day.
The entire first half of the disc never seems to recover from
the weak leadoff track “Kissing Willie,” a song which is as much of
a momentum killer than anything Tull had recorded in their history.
Tracks like “Ears Of Tin,” “The Whaler’s Dues” and the title track
fail to recover any ground — but one even has to question whether
they would have had success on their own. To my ears, they would
not have. Instead of sounding like a band rejuvenated by attention
from younger ears, this sounds like a band barely able to stay
focused on the songs at hand.
It is only at the disc’s close when the track “Strange Avenues”
suggests that there is life left in this band — pity it took 45
minutes to make this discovery. Pity, too, that it came too late to
really salvage the disc.
Anderson would still have some tricks up his sleeve, and Jethro
Tull was, by no means, a dead (or worse yet, an oldies) band. But
Rock Island did suggest that the group had struck a reef,
and was taking in water quickly.