Live At Tower Theatre, Upper Darby, PA, USA 1987-11-25.
Stormwatch is the album that they often call the third of the Tull folk rock trilogy and after Songs From The Wood and Heavy Horses (and their subsequent five star extended version in this series) it has a hard job to do…
Jethro Tull’s 1970 classic Benefit will be celebrated in a brand-new 4CD/2DVD set, featuring remixes by Steven Wilson, an abundance of previously unreleased material, packaged within a deluxe hardback book, containing 100 pages of commentary from numerous contributors alongside hordes of images of the band creating and performing their first million-selling album. Benefit (The 50th Anniversary Enhanced Edition) will be out on 5th November. Following the successes This Was (1968) and Stand Up (1969), Jethro Tull returned in 1970 with their third studio album in as many years. Benefit (The 50th Anniversary Enhanced Edition) contains a copious amount of expanded material, building upon the 2013 Steven Wilson remixes. CD3 contains a previously unreleased Steven Wilson remix of Jethro Tull performing at Tanglewood in 1970. Further to that, CD4 contains a newly remastered version of a concert at The Aragon Ballroom in 1970 in mono.
One of the great concept albums by one of the great prog rock acts, Thick as a Brick found Jethro Tull making a big splash with the monolithic, one-track juggernaut of an album. Revisiting that classic work, frontman Ian Anderson takes to the stage in Iceland, performing the album, as well as its 2011 sequel, Thick as a Brick 2, in front of a live crowd on Thick as a Brick: Live in Iceland…
This celebration of Jethro Tull’s tenth album follows a similar pattern to previous reissues, with the first disc containing a Steven Wilson remix followed by some ‘associated recordings’ including the previously unreleased Old Aces Die Hard and Working John, Working Joe. CDs two and three offer 22 track live tracks, recorded on the Songs From The Wood Tour across two American dates, (Boston on 6 December 1977 and Maryland on 21 November 1977). These unheard tracks have been remixed to stereo by Jakko Jakszyk and are completely unheard. There are two DVDs in this set. The first contains a 5.1 surround sound mix (DTS and Dolby 5.1) and 96/24 LPCM stereo versions of the both the original and Steven Wilson remixed version of Songs From The Wood. This DVD also features selected associated tracks, as well as various quad mixes and flat transfers. The other DVD contains video footage from that Maryland gig of 21 November 1977. The audio has been mixed to stereo and 5.1.
Where the first Jethro Tull box five years earlier, 20 Years of Jethro Tull, mostly traded on radio broadcast performances and rarities, a few outtakes, and a remastered collection of key songs, 25th Anniversary Boxed Set benefits from a more thorough raid on the vaults that has yielded up one essential addition to any Jethro Tull collection. Disc two is the centerpiece of the set, containing an additional hour of the group's November 4, 1970 concert at Carnegie Hall in New York (two pieces were previously issued on Living in the Past). Preserved on a 16-track master tape, this benefit show for the drug rehabilitation program Phoenix House was the group's most prominent American gig up to that time…
Live At The Internationale Congress Centrum, Berlin, Germany 16th March 1985.
Released just as punk was taking hold on the public's imagination in America and making groups like Jethro Tull seem like dinosaurs on their way to extinction, Bursting Out became a seemingly perpetual denizen of the cutout bins for years afterward. However, it happened to be a good album, a more-than-decent capturing of a live Tull concert from Europe. The sound is remarkably good, given the group's arena rock status at the time, and the repertoire is a solid representation of the group's history, going all the way back to "A New Day Yesterday" from their second album and up through 1978's Heavy Horses, with stops along the way for "Bouree," "Aqualung," "Locomotive Breath," "Cross-Eyed Mary," and a compact reprise of Thick as a Brick. Some of these tracks work better than others – the tendency here is to play loud and hard, and sometimes that just doesn't translate well on record; seeing "Locomotive Breath" probably worked better than hearing it.