Of the three late 70s studio albums that make up this phase of Tull there’s no doubt that Stormwatch is the weakest. My personal favourite is Heavy Horses (10/10) , then Songs from the Wood (9/10). Stormwatch still scores an 8/10 .

It’s also the days when the set finished with the ambushers and before the shows started to end with the familiar strains of Cheerio, but as a live set it proves a fitting swan song for several seemingly well-set band members. Stormwatch‘s theme and album cover seemed to be rather prophetic for the band, with the coming personnel departures and the confusing genre-bending of Jethro Tull’s near future albums in the early 1980s.

Did I care about any of this at the time? Nah, I was four years old, and much more concerned with what Santa was leaving under the tree that Christmas. I do remember the cold that year though. Brrrr. The most important part of any music is for me the quality of the actual material and Stormwatch offers some really strong compositions that are up to par with those on Aqualung and Heavy Horses. North Sea Oil and Orion have strong and memorable melodies that grab a hold of you from the start. Apart from being darker in their lyrical content and quite heavy and hard edged, these two are quite typical high quality Jethro Tull songs. Home, on the other hand, is a very symphonic and somewhat bombastic ballad that is very uncharacteristic of Jethro Tull. It contributes to making this album more varied and diverse than many other Jethro Tull albums. The diversity is indeed one of Stormwatch's strongest features. majority of it just fails to be what I suppose it tries to be. Therefore, Stormwatch gets merely two Martin Barre stated in November 2011 that there were no current plans for further Jethro Tull work, and in 2012 he put his own band together and toured as Martin Barre's New Day. The new band included former Tull bassist Jonathan Noyce and played mostly Tull material. [96] [97] In 2015, Barre said: "It's important that people realize there will never be a Jethro Tull again. There will be two solo bands, the Ian Anderson Band and the Martin Barre Band, and long may they exist, and long may they enjoy playing music." Barre said he hated to hear "Oh, you've left Jethro Tull". He said, "Ian wanted to finish Jethro Tull. [He] wanted to stop the band completely." [98]

It was the close of a decade when 'Stormwatch', Jethro Tull's 12th studio album, was released. The 70s were ending, but this After a good start with “North Sea Oil”, although in principle only a derivative of songs already heard on their two previous albums, and the slightly ponderous yet catchy “Orion”, the album’s contour fades and it drifts on with rather empty events, struggling to constitute a weak appendix to _Songs from the Wood_ and _Heavy Horses_. The consistency and wholesale energy of Songs from the Wood is not quite here in its form. However, In April 2014, after the release of Homo Erraticus, Anderson stated that in future he would release all his music under his own name. He said Jethro Tull had "more or less come to an end" during the past 10 years, and that in his twilight years he would prefer to use his own name, "for the most part being composer of virtually all Tull songs and music since 1968". [5] Anderson also said in the album's liner notes that he would continue to perform under his own name. another good song by the group in the same vein of the previous one. However, it's a song more dark andSTORMWATCH is one of them.I am very fond of this album, found the songwriting top notch, the whole record highly enjoyable Stormwatch" works simultaneously as the closure for an era and the culmination of a specific musical Stormwatch' is perhaps the last essential Jethro Tull's album, a cohesive curtain call for the band's trademark prog- The rest of the album is… meh. Okay. Listenable. Musically, I don’t find Something’s on the Move to be particularly better than North Sea Oil, but you’re right about the lyrics being both better and more connected to the theme. hands of modern industry's artificiality. (By the way, did I explain that this is the album's basic concept? No?

see the band as merely rehashing old ideas by this point. While this does hold some truth, the music STORMWATCH: 40 th ANNIVERSARY FORCE 10 EDITION concludes with two audio-only DVDs that feature various mixes of the original album along with the associated recordings featured in this set. Grammy's 10 Biggest Upsets". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on 13 June 2011 . Retrieved 13 February 2007. In keeping with the mood of innovation surrounding the album, Jethro Tull developed a music video titled Slipstream. [90] Four staged and separately filmed music videos were mixed with concert footage from the A tour. London's Hammersmith Odeon was used for exterior scenes, but the main concert footage came from an American performance at the Los Angeles Sports Arena (as heard on the Magic Piper ROIO), filmed in November 1980. The video, released in 1981, was directed by David Mallet, who had directed the pioneering " Ashes to Ashes" video for David Bowie.

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arrangements and playful mandolin interventions, solidly displayed on an alternation of 7/8 and 4/4 tempos. The final act in the famous folk trilogy is not as much of a letdown as so many people seem to think. It seems STORMWATCH is a story of apples and oranges for TULL lovers; for some, this is the beginning of the end and others- looking at the situation the band was in. Still, I take the music on the album for what it is, and the

reminders from 'Pibroch' and 'No Lullaby', while 'North Sea Oil' aims at becoming the sequel of 'And the high-caliber flute work drive most of the songs, making even the least original songs fun no matter and great double bass action. The vocal lines are some of the best since Songs from the Wood. PartsStormwatch is the last Tull album before the new keyboards technology incorporation, present on the "A" record. Compared to the previous Heavy horses album, the electric guitar here REALLY becomes more distorted and aggressive, and many parts flirt with the metal boundary. This will become Martin Barre's trademark on the next albums. There are many moving orchestral arrangements by David Palmer: they are very symphonic. Anderson uses some echo effects on his voice. The combination of orchestral arrangements with a quasi-metal guitar is very unique and special. I must say the keyboards are not extremely elaborated, but when they are present, they are quite interesting, especially the piano & portative organ. There are many excellent flute parts. This record contains many acoustic instruments, like mandolin, classical & acoustic guitar. The bass is quite well played and is quite bottom. Drums are excellent and very varied. It is important to mention that, for the first time, there is something sounding modern on their album. This Tull album is definitely underrated, and it is among their best albums! Top of the Pops (UK)– Season 7, Episode 5: 29th January 1970". TV.com. Archived from the original on 7 March 2016 . Retrieved 30 January 2016. Stormwatch' would be the final album for Jethro Tull's longest lasting and arguably with the best group of