1001 Albums Summary

So, this my first album. I found about this project from a random Reddit post while researching Tim Buckley's album Goodbye and Hello. Funky and chill, obviously I'm already familiar with three tracks out of nine. Solid tight dance-worthy stuff, but personally I don't often listen to something like this, too much repetition. It's tiring unless I'm in a specific mood. I had to skip the second half of all songs because there was not enough development. But I guess the contrast with Buckley is not helping here.

70's prog is my favourite genre, but I never got into Jethro Tull, I would enjoy them way more if it was a purely instrumental band. The flute is especially amazing. The first part of the album was quite hard to digest, both structurally and meaning-wise. To me the whole first part of the album is way too built around the natural speech pattern, while I prefer instrument-first approach. I usually don't listen to lyrics much, but for this project I'm reading along and looking up the meaning, as I want to be thorough. I definitely wasn't prepared for the Aqualung and Cross-Eyed Mary's meaning. I get what they were going for but I use art for escapism and I'd rather not listen about creepy men in song form, as there's enough of that irl. My God is a little on the heavier side, I like it best, it has a tighter structure and more energy. Great flute solo. Hymn 43 is also pretty cool, reminds me a little of Dio's earlier band Elf. I have a thing for juicy rock'n'roll piano, so this is right up my alley. Locomotive Breath is also really groovy. The lyrics in general, both the social criticism and specifically the anti-religious remarks, are not very subtle and frankly made me cringe more than once, but maybe for their time they were considered edgy as hell. A lot of the criticism is too obvious and at the same time separates the concept of god from the organised religion, as if protecting it, which is cartoonish to me. Come to think of it, in my playlist I have an example of these same topics being explored with way more grace by Fabrizio de André (e.g. Il testamento di Tito).

Incredible voice and incredible grooviness. "Good to Me As I Am To You" and "Ain't No Way" are especially delicious (love the backing vocals in the latter). "Chain Of Fools" is great as well, especially the beginning.