Jethro Tull, Thick As A Brick

If this were a prog rock concert, the high-quality production would be well worth the price of admission and I might even stay seated for the whole thing. But this is a take-home album, for goodness sake, and in the manner of a passive-aggressive orthodontist Ian Anderson is going to make you sit through all of it whether you want to or not. Only the limitations of the LP yielded the band's solitary concession to split it in half. As musings on life and childhood and art, the lyrics are creative enough (as is that famous tabloid gatefold); as a self-indulgent satire of the worst excesses of the concept album, the idea is certainly clever. But a good idea doesn't necessarily make 43 minutes of it worth continuously sitting through, even when the execution's solid. As proof, the 25th anniversary reissue includes a 1978 live performance ... that's less than twelve. (Content: mild adult themes.)

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