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Heavy Horses
 
 
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Heavy Horses [Original recording reissued] [Original recording remastered]

~ Jethro Tull
4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
Price: £5.78 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Frequently Bought Together

Heavy Horses + Songs from the Wood + Minstrel in the Gallery
Price For All Three: £18.24

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Product details

  • Audio CD (14 April 2003)
  • Number of Discs: 1
  • Format: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
  • Label: Chrysalis
  • ASIN: B00008G9JO
  • Other Editions: MP3 Download
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 5,691 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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Listen to Samples and Buy MP3s

Songs from this album are available to purchase as MP3s. Click on "Buy MP3" or view the MP3 Album.

Extraits
Song Title Time Price
Listen  1. And The Mouse Police Never Sleeps (2003 Digital Remaster) 3:12£0.69
Listen  2. Acres Wild (2003 Digital Remaster) 3:24£0.69
Listen  3. No Lullaby (2003 Digital Remaster) 7:54£0.69
Listen  4. Moths (2003 Digital Remaster) 3:27£0.69
Listen  5. Journey Man (2003 Digital Remaster) 3:57£0.69
Listen  6. Rover (2003 Digital Remaster) 4:17£0.69
Listen  7. One Brown Mouse (2003 Digital Remaster) 3:22£0.69
Listen  8. Heavy Horses (2003 Digital Remaster) 8:54£0.69
Listen  9. Weathercock (2003 Digital Remaster) 4:06£0.69
Listen10. Living In These Hard Times (2003 Digital Remaster) 3:10£0.69
Listen11. Broadford Bazaar (2003 Digital Remaster) 3:38£0.69

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
Although both albums share a marked sense of rural enchantment and find Jethro Tull at the very apex of their folky prog-rock ingenuity, 1978's Heavy Horses is often unfairly portrayed, by fans and critics alike, as a thematic follow-up to its immediate studio predecessor Songs from the Wood. Both offerings are excellent, but they do deserve to be appreciated in isolation. While Songs from the Wood evokes a magical atmosphere of mysterious nature-worshipping spirituality, Heavy Horses is far more earthly, a nostalgic glance at agricultural realism with a Cornish pasty--not a book about fairies--in its back-pocket.

Indeed, on the progressive, nine-minute-long title-track--a most poetic ode to the English countryside's traditional ploughing beasts of burden--Ian Anderson almost sings with the sorrow of an old-time farmhand witnessing the combine harvesters and crop-sprayers coming over the horizon for the first time. One can even forgive him the rather randy line "Let me find you a filly for your proud stallion seed, to keep the old line going". Sure, there's plenty of prattle about drinking afternoon tea with mice, but tracks like "Moths" and "Acres Wild"--the latter a Scottish-jig flavoured homage to Ian Anderson's salmon-farming locale of Skye--mark Heavy Horses out as a must-own in the Jethro Tull canon. Somehow, they were never quite as good, as often, again. --Kevin Maidment

CD Description
HEAVY HORSES brings together the best elements of Jethro Tull's sonic arsenal: heavy guitars, intricate, evolving song structures, folk tendencies, and Ian Anderson's inimitable growl. The album opens with the bouncy "And the Mouse Police Never Sleeps", a fairy tale-like song about the adventures of a group of forest animals. "Acres Wild" features a disco-esque groove held down by funky drums and bass.
The album's out-and-out highlight is the nearly eight-minute "No Lullaby", a song that undergoes the sort of musical metamorphosespresent in Tull's best material. Another exceptional effortis the multi-textured title track, a song written as a tribute to the farm horses in England (which, at the time of thealbum's release, were declining in number). HEAVY HORSES isone of the band's most heartfelt efforts.

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Customer Reviews

16 Reviews
5 star:
 (14)
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 (1)
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Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (16 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Tull's rural idyll still charms 30 years on, 1 Jun 2007
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.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An Extremely Special Album, 13 Aug 2006
By Mr. D. J. Rudram "David J Rudram" (Great Britain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic rock with a folky touch, 1 Mar 2004
By WJ Davidson (Edinburgh) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Return of the Native
After the bucolic "Songs from the Wood" album, Tull returned in 1978 with another rural classic which could easily be the soundtrack to a Thomas Hardy novel. Read more
Published 19 days ago by M. Blackwell

5.0 out of 5 stars Totally Brilliant
Not knowing a huge about 70's music apart from what my Dad blasts out, I confess to not being an expert on Jethro Tull. Read more
Published 4 months ago by pippy long stockings

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent Moths
Got into Jethro Tull in the early 80's on the back of this, Stormwatch and Songs from the wood (the so called folk trilogy) - I picked up all the back cat over the yrs and... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Biko's biro

5.0 out of 5 stars A heavyweight in every sense!
To readdress the imbalance caused by C.James from Belfast who's ill considered comments on this true 5 star masterpiece have lost it half a star in it's overall rating. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Costa Rica

5.0 out of 5 stars The very best of Tull
This is absolutely brilliant folk/prog rock. Every track here stands up on its own and each complements the others forming a flawless whole. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Sparky

1.0 out of 5 stars Kak
Aqualung was pretty hot , Thick as a Brick too .
This stuff is , like , second rate Fairport Convention .
Just listen to the samples .... Read more
Published on 30 Jun 2007 by C. James

4.0 out of 5 stars it's as well we tell no lies.....
Jethro Tull are a band who defy categorisation. They've been accused of folk rock, prog rock, jazz rock, blues rock, and they are all of these things and more. Read more
Published on 5 May 2006 by Mr. M. D. Smith

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple, noble sound
'78 year's announcement and the best board are included, and their 14th works.
The work of "Jethro Tull" feels the attachment in the one with a lot of frequencies to which... Read more
Published on 20 April 2006 by mm

5.0 out of 5 stars Paean to country lifestyle
fresh breezes in the morning invigorating the lungs, fecund soil underfoot and the smell of heather and manure... Read more
Published on 25 Dec 2005 by Hill Walker

5.0 out of 5 stars Tull at their best!
From their folky period, along with 'Minstrel in the Gallery' and 'Songs from the Wood', I highly recommend this into the 'every home should have one' catergory. Read more
Published on 11 Dec 2004 by Mr. N. J. Bayliss

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