Review Summary: One of the most essential progressive albums to ever be created, Thick As A Brick deserves a spot in every music lover's collection.
Critics and Ian Anderson, who always was a bit touchy when it came to the opinions of others, never got along very well. During the worst of times, the minstrel was martyred by the media for his almost-unreasonably ambitious music, and during the best of times, the critics lauded him with praise and he
still found something to be unhappy about. The latter situation occurred upon the release of
Aqualung: the album was generally well-received, but Anderson found himself displeased by (or perhaps amused at) the critic’s incessant labeling of the work as a concept album. “If the critics want a concept album we'll give the mother of all concept albums,” said Anderson, and thus was birthed
Thick As A Brick, one of the greatest progressive rock albums.
From the very start, Anderson’s goal was to create the most grandiose, pompous oeuvre that could be made. It’s safe to say that, in this respect,
Thick As A Brick is an astounding success: the forty minute-long songs is an amalgam of everything from harpsichords to electric guitars and yazz flutes, tempo changes permeate the album, and the band switches genres on a dime, with folky flutes instantaneously giving way to scorching blues guitars and exuberant organs. Despite this, the album never becomes a meandering, unfocused mess like most other similar endeavors (the album’s successor,
A Passion Play is, while quite enjoyable, a perfect example of such a mess), and every single melody is refined to absolute perfection.
Thick As A Brick’s orchestration is certainly daring (trumpets, strings, and even a timpani find their way into the album), but one can’t help feeling that the actual melodies, stylistically, aren’t very different from standard Tull fare. Despite the layers of instruments, the listener’s focus is always directed to the folky tunes that are hidden underneath the virtuosic drums and layers of countless instruments.
Lyrically, the album is every bit as overblown as it is musically: youths build castles, poets and painters cast shadows upon oceans crossed by discolored infantry, and ancient tribal legends lie cradled in calls of seagulls; in other words, the lyrics are full of bombast. And yet, this doesn’t exactly detract from the experience-quite the opposite, in fact. As pompous as the lyrics are, one can’t deny the skillfulness of Anderson’s writing, and lines such as
Let me help you pick up your dead as the sins of the father are fed/with the blood of the fools and/the thoughts of the wise are penned with such a poeticism that pretension is easily forgiven. Furthermore, such lyrics fit perfectly with the grandiose music, and so, instead of bringing the album down, the texts thus make the opus seem even more epic and monumental.
Truth be told,
Thick As A Brick is everything that a progressive rock album should be. Every single melody is memorable and interesting, the music is complex but not overly confusing, and the bombast and pomp only improve the album. Never would the band reach such a peak either in terms of performance or composition (though, on both counts,
Heavy Horses would come very close), and so
Thick As A Brick remains a timeless classic of progressive rock.
5/5
