Jethro Tull’s Stormwatch at 40
2019 is the 40th year since the release of Jethro Tull’s Stormwatch, so it’s time for a retrospective, as there’s so much to be said about this album — especially as it’s strangely low-profile in Tull and rock chronicles. Crank it on your big speakers (preferably from vinyl) — it is anything but low-profile; it’s “shaking the dead,” as the lyric says. This is a big band at the top of its powers, and on this album they create the best sound they (or pretty much any other band) ever made: the icy, naturalistic synthesizers; the silken but steely string quartet; the powerful but tonal and melodic drumming; the searing reverberant guitar which presaged U2; and most irreplaceable, Anderson’s roaring, rasping vocals, with which he manages to simultaneously spoof and epitomize feral rock singing. How could this album be as close as it is to being forgotten?
It’s good from the very first notes: the descending minor-key three-note motif that opens ‘North Sea Oil’ has a plaintive tone which, enwrapped in the song’s busy clanking of industry, expresses the yearning inherent in an exploratory industry, and also the yearning for wealth, for a return to economic strength, or (for the working joes on the rigs) just a good-paying job, that the oil bonanza evoked. The five-beat makes a welcome return, Anderson and the band making it seamless and natural-sounding (which Rush, likable though they are, never could). The final flourish has Tull’s signature precision, power and panache, better than ever. Quite a good start.
Stormwatch is the third of what many listeners perceive loosely as a ‘folk’ trilogy, but more precisely the thread that unites them is the theme of human and nature. Songs From The Wood starts from an atavistic point, with little modernity and indeed little taming of nature, hearkening to when forests pressed against hand-cleared fields; Heavy Horses dwells on nature tamed by artisanal means which themselves are threatened by mechanization; and Stormwatch describes the rape of nature — and nature’s inclination to return the favor (fast forward to ‘Wounded, Old and Treacherous’ from 1995’s Roots to Branches for an even starker statement on this) — and while we’re at it, man’s inhumanity to man. You can’t describe that with mandolins; so Tull’s unleashing of the full-bore rock sound is the consequence of the theme. Not commerciality.
This is not a perfect album (as Songs From The Wood is, and Heavy Horses comes close to), so let’s get the criticisms out of the way. ‘Home’ doesn’t quite cut it; the album did need a slower quieter song at that stage of the proceedings, but ‘Home’ is not inventive, its emotion feels slightly contrived, and its point is not clear. ‘Warm Sporran’ is charming, it’s consistent with the album’s musical landscape, and (like the whole album) brilliantly produced, but its triviality breaks the album’s tremendous dark momentum. If they had to have a light-hearted change of pace in that spot, the unreleased ‘Strip Cartoon’ would have been better. Better yet though not light-hearted would have been the also-unreleased and contemporaneous ‘Blues Instrumental,’ first heard years later on the ’20 Years Of’ collection: its slow, stalking pace and bolero crescendo, its ambiguity between light and shade, thought and feeling would have been a great conclusion to side 1. ‘Old Ghosts’ sounds intriguing at first but doesn’t develop. And ‘Elegy’ is too saccharine; if its formal composition had been matched by a playing with tight emotional reserve, it might have concluded the album on an appropriate note of emotional exhaustion. As it is, played with sententious sweetness, it just dissipates the album’s force. Well, we’ve heard the stories of how hard it was to cut this album, with a band member sick and Anderson being Anderson, so these shortcomings are understandable, and they don’t submerge the album’s high points and overall force. Now, let’s peruse those high points.
Has anyone noticed that the ascending, minor-key, three-note motif in ‘Something’s On The Move’ is the reverse of that in ‘North Sea Oil’? And that the theme of Something’s on the Move — nature striking back at man — is the reverse of that of North Sea Oil — man pillaging nature? Quite a coincidence. I can forgive the fact that Something’s on the Move is so clearly the album’s designated hit-single release; it deserved to be a hit. Boiling over with energy and syncopation; how Barre lets his low-string tuning go a little sharp in the opening and recurring riff, suggesting something ominously disconnected and under its own control; a culmination of the album’s great sound and reverberating production, where the guitar grinds, the piano pounds, the flute shrieks, and the percussion lashes from high to low tones, yet it all somehow sounds elegant. (I daresay it was at the time, and may still be, the only rock song about a glacier.) And Anderson’s lyrics rise to the task of imagining nature’s onslaught against civilization: “Driving all before her, unstoppable unstraining, the cold creaking mass follows reindeer down… Thin spreading fingers seek to embrace the still-warm bundles…that huddle on the doorsteps of a white London town.” Does he imagine this perhaps a bit gleefully? Could it be that our beloved Ian has a misanthropic streak? We report, you decide.
Dun Ringill serves as title track as the lyrics work in the phrase ‘stormwatch.’ As we first heard on Songs From The Wood, Anderson is unsurpassed at depicting nature in music. The song’s unstable, undulating key represents the ocean’s ceaseless movements (Dun Ringill is a ruined Celtic fort on a promontory overlooking the sea); the low finger-picked notes are the deeply rolling waves, the high notes are their wind-frothed caps. Anderson’s restless musical progressivism shows itself even in this minimalist all-acoustic song: he plays with electronic effects to give his vocal lines strange pre-echoes, which give you a disorienting sense of time itself sloshing back and forth. And the final dissonant chord on the twelve-string implies some wariness or dismay at nature’s indifference and potential cruelty.
And lastly, I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say that Dark Ages is the best-ever Tull song. (Can’t understand why more people don’t think so.) The opening swirl of naturalistic synthesizer sounds; the gradually-paced exposition with the strong, chilling, doomsday lyrics (“Darlings are you ready…for the long winter’s fall? said the lady in her parlour; said the butler in the hall. Is there time for another? cried the drunkard in his sleep. Not likely, said the little child — what’s done the Lord can keep. And the vicar stands a-praying…and the television dies…as the white dot flickers and is gone — and no one stops to cry”). And then… Tull became famous for unforewarned tempo changes with Aqualung. Here they take it to a new level. The heavy stutter-step to which the slow opening has built now suddenly breaks in an instant to a full gallop, like a race horse from its gate, like a long volley of machine-gun fire as Martin Barre hammers his low Gs. A touch of Philip Glass minimalism comes in: the guitar’s machine-gun monotone solo goes on alone a bit longer than expected; it sheds the expected symmetry. Barrie Barlow comes in with a drum lick, waits, then another, waits some more, then a beautiful long flurry that ends up finally locking in the 6/8 time. All this, and things are just getting started; we’re barely a third of the way through the song. Suffice it to say, the 6/8 gallop of the long middle section deserves a fair comparison to the dark scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth. One more little thing to mention: at the end of the guitar solo towards the end of the fast section, listen for the guitar growling low getting ready to wind up its solo, then the flute rolls up into a high-pitched, plaintive harmony for the solo’s final chops, descending as the guitar notes ascend. It’s a small moment of surpassingly intense ensemble playing, and poignant considering that the band was by that stage fatally fractious.
And — really my last point on Dark Ages — near the end when Anderson sings “SHAKING THE DEAD” on a high E in his rasping roar, it’s hard to imagine any more thrilling rock singing before or since. (Sadly, his voice couldn’t take it — he put so much energy into it in this period, it started dissolving a year or two later.)
Well, so — as you can tell, this album really gets me. If they could have filled in the holes that I mentioned, it could have been the best Tull album ever (which is to say pretty much the best rock album ever). As it is, it’s a magnificent not-quite (a bit like Apocalypse Now), but with enough peerless moments and sound and a deeply serious theme (now more so than ever — the price of raping nature, how politics become brutal when stress levels rise) to make it a great album. And in retrospect, a poignant one, because Tull hit an apotheosis with Stormwatch, indeed took rock to an apotheosis, and then was never the same (and I think never as good) after.
