Main menu
Fretplay home Submit tabs

Jethro Tull
Jethro Tull tabs Jethro Tull discography

Channels
Guitar channel Bass channel Guitar videos Reviews

Message Forum
Guitar forum Bass forum Bands and artists Promote your band Recent discussions All categories

Fretplay.com

Jethro Tull guitar tabs

CD reviews

Crest of a Knave

Jethro Tull - Crest of a Knave Audio CD

A fair review of the Jethro Tull "Crest of a Knave" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Jethro Tull reviews here, or go back to the Jethro Tull tabs.

Band: Jethro Tull
Title: Crest of a Knave
Rating:

Release Date: 2005-04-26
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Steel Monkey 2: Farm on the Freeway 3: Jump Start 4: She Said She Was a Dancer 5: Dogs in the Midwinter 6: Budapest 7: Mountain Men 8: Waking Edge 9: Raising Steam 10: Part of the Machine [*]

Not Heavy Metal, But Lots of Electric Guitar
Martin Barre. Crest of a Knave - (1987) 10 Tracks (1 bonus) **** (55:37)

I know everybody likes to joke about how this album won the Grammy award in 1989 for Best Hard Rock / Metal Performance even though it is Not a Hard Rock or Metal album, but Crest of a Knave does have a preponderance of really good guitar work on it by Mr. Much more than most post Songs From the Wood albums, and it contains some fast-paced songs with a lot of dynamics to them.

I think one of the reasons Barre's guitar seems so prominent is that this album has an almost "stripped down" feel to it, due to the fact that Jethro Tull as a unit are now only 3 players: Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, and David Pegg (bass guitar). So, without a full-time keyboard player, Mr. Anderson himself filled in and kept things to a minimum in that department. Also, there is no full-time drummer in the band as of yet, so this album features a rotating cast of none other than 3 different drummers, who obviously did not try to stand out too much.

Other reviewers have commented on Ian Anderson's vocals on this particular album. I was unaware of any throat problems he might have been suffering from, I just thought he changed his style to a more "spoken word" type of delivery that reminded me of Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. In fact, towards the end of the album, on songs without Mr. Anderson's flute, combined with the excellent guitar playing of Mr. Barre, some of these tracks definitely remind me of the Dire Straits sound of the mid-80's.

Over all an enjoyable listen, especially if you long to hear more of Martin Barre's electric guitar prowess. The one bonus track, Part of the Machine, is an above-average song also.
.

Not Tull's best

It's true that JT are much more than a metal band, with their instrumental intricacy, taste and originality, but in the field of ROCKING OUT , any of the several incarnations of tull could wipe the floor with metalica pantera ,slayer or any of that crowd. This CD ranks near the bottom of JT's material, but I'd like to use this forum to comment on the heavymetal grammy.
Lars Ulrich vs Barlowe?
Oh my God. I hit Lars level in my first year of playing drums.
Hetfield vs Barre? heh heh heh!.

Nel Mezzo del cammin de nostra vita
The one thing that is undoubtedly true is that music appreciation is a subjective matter and the stupidest thing to do is hold our fellow listeners in suspicion or contempt simply because certain sounds cause vastly different reactions in them than they do in us. The more Tull reviews I read the more I'm convinced of how futile the whole enterprise is. In this spirit I approach Crest of a Knave, and in particular this re-mastered edition. To echo what someone else mentioned in reference to these Tull re-vampings, simply raising lows and highs doesn't make for a better sound. Through most of these tracks the kick drum is over-bearing and thumping, and the cymbals are hissy. It's been a long time since I heard my vinyl copy of this - which went missing several years ago - and I never owned it on CD, but I don't remember having such impressions before. Enough about that, on to the music.

I'm often surprised, even baffled, by the disparate opinions of my fellow Tull fans, but I have to remind myself that my opinions are probably stranger than most. For instance, while I like Budapest well enough, I don't think it stands head and shoulders above the average Tull song. I find it sparse and far too lengthy, and never mind who it sounds like. There are better songs on this album. One of the songs not included on the original LP, but which did appear on the CD version, which strikes me as something very fine is The Waking Edge. This is a country song. Not folk mind you, but country, as in American-style country and western. If you don't agree, go back and have another listen, particularly to the chorus. You'll have to skip the lengthy intro which runs to a minute and a half, and which, quite frankly, is an example of the kind of superfluous musical foreplay which makes a lot of progressive rock music intolerable to me. At 3:42 there's a beautiful solo, on bass guitar of all things. Not because it's a country song, and therefore highly unusual for Tull, but because it's a good song plain and simple, I think it's one of the highlights of the album.

Steel Monkey is a solid rock song, full of energy and muscular keyboards with Martin's false harmonics, reminiscent of ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, sprinkled all through-out. Jump Start and Farm on the Freeway are both strong tracks, particularly for the flute and guitar breaks which fill out both songs and in which Ian and Martin display the musical chemistry that makes them one of the most entertaining duos in rock music. Said She Was a Dancer is simlar to The Waking Edge in that it's country-fied, wistful, and laid-back. It includes some of Martin's best guitar work and shows that he is equally adept at both a heavy, distorted sound as well as one which is perfectly clean.

One of the regretable things about CDs is that you have the judge the whole album as a single unit from beginning to end. With records you had the album split into two sides and the artist was compelled by necessity to make each side function as a thing-unto-itself, and subsequently you had some sort of symmetry, or asymmetry, between the two, some sort of co-dependence or relation. The first side of Crest, on vinyl, ending with Said She Was a Dancer, constitutes a very solid Tull side. On the other hand, side two was not nearly as satisfying or coherent. You had the soft and sprawling Budapest followed by the decent but not terribly strong Mountain Men, and concluding with Raising Steam, perhaps the weakest track of the bunch. Not much of a consummation or climax, artistically speaking. The earlier CD version offered two more songs than the LP - Dogs in the Midwinter, The Waking Edge - and these tracks, although the former is not bad and the latter is excellent, even if they had been part of the LP's second side wouldn't have made side two as strong as side one. This was the last Tull album I ever owned on vinyl and maybe that's why I'm ruminating on this two-side issue.

At any rate there has always been something off kilter with Crest for me, and because of this I don't think it's absolutely top-shelf Tull, nor do I think it could have been. It's a new Ian Anderson vocal style for one thing. He doesn't sing on Crest as much as he speaks in tune, and he sounds like somebody else so often that it's actually a bit embarassing. One has to realize that he was about forty when Crest was recorded and one must face the fact that aging takes its toll on a person's voice, and particularly on a person who sings professionally. Getting down on a forty year-old man for not being able to belt it out like he did when he was twenty is like getting down on him for having a few gray hairs. For this reason I don't blame Ian for his more subdued style: I'm simply being honest when I say that it makes for a product which will inevitably be less magnificent than vintage Tull.

I also have to say that I like Part of the Machine more than any of the songs on Crest. The guitar and flute breaks are nothing short of brilliant. It's quintessential Tull, but unfortunately it can't be judged as an integral part of Crest of a Knave since it was never included on it. Had it been, it would have made Crest a better album.

Great record!
There is a wide variety of dynamic ranges here. I really like the mix between electronic and acoustic instruments. I think it was ahead of it's time as far as songwriting style and production goes. This record could be released anytime. This a nice album to listen to while working out, doing chores around the house, or taking a nice long drive. .

Jump start
Heavy metal grammy? of course it didn't deserve it, this album is far away from being a heavy metal album, while Barre's signature guitar make all the songs in Crest Of A Knave qualify into hard rock with electronic features, just with the exception of both more calm "Budapest" and "The Waking Edge". Luis Mejia (son) - Jethro Tull harsh movement from electronic rock was already determined to fail with Under Wraps, while Crest Of A Knave aims more into a hard rock condition, being a better musical approach, it still possesses some recognizable electronic features in a still comfortable way, as Ian Anderson's excitement into electronic keyboards was now cooling of, making an accurate hard rock. Still, this is much more of a promissing album since quite few of their past works, its still much more talented, although, of course, they were still trying to fit into a much more updated sound, resulting in somewhat awkward atmospheres with crude critics. Still, their most notable traces of electronic rock are notorious on the opening "Steel Monkey", while the following "Farm On The Freeway" keeps more performance credit and some much more comprehensible melodies. Of course, this mixture of electronic rock with hard rock sounds awkward into terms of comparing it with their other works, and the aspect of unaccessible music for casual listeners is obviously present (and I say it within my own experience, this was once my first Tull album and I really thought they were an electronic rock band), but in its own contextures, the calm but very intriguing, original "Budapest" is here a true gem, it even became a minor hit, as its foreign flavour and musical versatility with its slow burning, passionate moods make it one of their best in their whole career, it is unnoticeable for being 10 minutes long. The moody, anti-war "Mountain Men" stands also remarkable, while the playful mood in "Dogs In The Midwinter" and the comfortable guitars in "Jump Start" both possess Jethro Tull's much more recognizable music. "Raising Steam" may stand as the most hard rocking. A detail about their performance is that Ian Anderson's voice sounds a lot like the Dire Straits' vocalist, in result of a recent (at that time) throat surgery. An awkward mood may surround the album, but in its own contextures is a great musical experience, much more comprehensible for previous fans, and quite a more promissing album than their previous three works.

You can see a complete list of all Jethro Tull discography, or go back to the Jethro Tull tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.