HEAVY HORSES LP (VINYL) US CHRYSALIS 1978

Released in January 1978 and very similar in style to its predecessor Songs From The Wood, Heavy Horses to my mind represents the absolute peak of Ian Anderson's songwriting and lyrical genius. If you like brilliant tunes and superb earthy and rustic lyrics concerning amongst other things, Cats, Horses, Trains and little furry folk then this is the album for you. While playing this album you can almost taste the countryside as pure and perfect Jethro Tull tumbles out from the speakers.

With many records there is often a need to only programme in certain tracks so as to avoid poor and tuneless filler material. With Heavy Horses there is no need to do this as it is a perfect set from start to finish.

As far as I am concerned all the songs on the album are tuneful classics. Lyrically though the track 'Journeyman' is extra special and concerns Ian Anderson's observations during a late night train journey. In the song he likens a commuter's black briefcase to a dog sleeping in the draft beside the carriage door. It's genius writing, which is so clever that you can almost believe that you are on that very train. The title track 'Heavy Horses' is also fabulous and builds up gradually to a fine Martin Barre guitar solo which gets things rocking very nicely. Is it Heavy Rock music? Is it Folk? I can't really say as it defies categorisation. Let's just say then that it's perfect Jethro tull of the very best vintage.

So there we have it. A brilliant album and an absolute must for anyone interested in listening to some extremely well crafted music.

Heavier than Songs From the Wood but still exploring pastoral themes, this is one of the defining albums from Jethro Tull.
Great lyrics, superb tunes.

If you like Tull you must own this.
If you like heavy rock but don't know Tull (?), its probably their best jumping on point.

It would be easy to take a negative view of this album. Released in 1978, with punk laying low the titans of prog rock, it emerged to widespread indifference. With the zeitgeist buzzing to songs of urban and suburban alienation, anarchy in the UK and the urgent realpolitik of the street, what were Jethro Tull doing? Living up to their early 70s song title and living in the past. As album concepts go, it just doesn't get any more conservative than this. The folk instrumentation without the protest lyrics of the folk music. Songs that sneer at the spiritual vaccuum of the cities and celebrate the medieval nobility of the shire horse, the farm cat and the field mouse. Even the back cover depicts the band as "squires of the manor". A couple of decades later, John Major's speech about old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist would come to define just how laughably out-of-touch the Tories had become, but "Heavy Horses" is _full_ of that sort of sentiment. It must have seemed to rock critics back in '78 that Tull were marching to irrelevance and extinction.

Nevertheless, I fell in love to this album in the spring of 1984. While Britain was reeling under the Miners' Strike and every punk dystopia seemed to be coming true, I was on a train travelling through France, watching the Gallic countryside sweep by, listening to "Heavy Horses". And in that moment, as an understanding of just how different, how intriguingly and profoundly alien France was to England, this album soundtracked my gentle culture shock and I understood I was listening to something utterly and unmistakeably English. I've never stopped listening to it since, but where are Arthur Scargill, the N.U.M. and the angry punk movement now? They have become history, while oddly "Heavy Horses" remains, as leaf-crisp and dew-fresh as the day the vinyl was cut.

This is in no small measure due to the outstanding quality of the material here. Ian Anderson's muse has never worked harder. These songs exhibit every Tull virtue, but none of the characteristic vices. Tracks like 'Heavy Horses' itself or the sinister 'No Lullaby' manage to be complex and portentous, without ever sounding smug or pretentious the way Thick As a Brick did. 'One Brown Mouse' and 'The Mouse Police Never Sleeps' are delightfully witty and whimsical, without descending into any childish nonsense about hares losing spectacles. 'Journeyman' casts a satirical eye on the gloomy lot of the evening commuter, but avoids sneering like the anti-God stuff on Aqualung, a genuine affection and compassion breathes forth. And 'Moths'... 'Moths' is quite simply the most beautiful song Jethro Tull ever wrote or performed, my all time Desert Island Disk.

Arguably, this album turned out to be something of a high watermark for Tull. They wisely distanced themselves from English folk motifs hereafter, to revisit them in diluted form in the Scottish and sepulchral Stormwatch, dallying with electronica on Under Wraps, before settling into the percussive prog-rock groove they'd perfected on Aqualung for all their subsequent output. At the time, this album may well have been a regressive step for Anderson & Co, retreating into a bucolic fantasy world in the face of musical and cultural changes that seemed overwhelming and threatening back in the late '70s. Yet, somehow, it drew forth their keenest expression. Like Spenser abandoned in Ireland by his English court or Malory doodling in gaol, to find solace in the timeless mystique of the hedgerow and the field, in a Faerie Queene or Morte D'Arthur, well that might just be the most quintessentially English thing of all.