Jethro Tull
Aqualung

THE REVIEW

In the early '70s, hordes of embittered minds had the excellent habit of setting their hallucinatory worlds to music, where vaguely anthropomorphic life forms could freely wander, elves walking their rhinos through the forest, aliens as gentle and benevolent as even E.T. But above all, the idea that the healthy and Christian principles of picture-perfect families like those in Mulino Bianco ads were nothing more than colossal hypocrisy could circulate. In many cases, from this blend of guitars, delirium, and freedom, great albums would emerge. In rarer cases, absolute masterpieces emerged. One of these is Aqualung, the 1971 album by Jethro Tull. It's the story of a tramp – Aqualung, indeed – seen as a product of a self-generated and destructive humanity (“In the beginning, Man created God, and he created him in his own image [...] and Man formed Aqualung from the dust of the ground, and a host of others like him”).

The title track opens the album with a riff that is History, the only one capable of getting me fully aroused apart from the ones from “fuma sul cesso” by Ian Cazzoduro Gillian and “smells” by Kurt Douglas. While Aqualung sits on the park bench, blowing his nose and watching little girls, the track fades into an acoustic interlude before launching back with a solo that really rocks.
The next track, Crossed Eye Mary, tells the story of a cross-eyed prostitute with a good heart, the only person who pays any attention to Aqualung. The song begins with a bass-flute duet (an instrument always used by Jethro Tull), then transforms into the album's "hardest" song.
Three acoustically rare and elegantly beautiful pieces follow (Cheap Day Return, Mother Goose - in which Aqualung himself gets to speak – and Wond'ring Aloud).
In the second part of the album, in a stark contrast, the focus shifts from Aqualung to the relationship between the bourgeoisie and religion. And here it gets tricky. Because our beloved ones lay bare all the Church's flaws, with its hypocrisy and exploitation (God is not a wind-up mechanism that can be wound every Sunday, says “Wind Up”). All this in a mix of hard rock, progressive, and traditional English folk, which here, even more so than in the subsequent “Thick as a Brick”, finds its golden balance and makes it an album that – for crying out loud!– cannot be missing from the shelves of a person with honest intellectual capabilities.