Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

To move forward is to evolve, and yet in the hands of a master, time can become meaningless; 50 years producing music that quite often defied convention, that ridiculed the notion of stereotyping, and refused to be tied to one person, despite critics and fans alike quite often only associating the magic of flute with the name itself, that is the meaninglessness of Time, for Jethro Tull, Time is a scope of illusion and imagery.

Imagery is the tapestry into which every Jethro Tull/Ian Anderson album has been created. Illusion is the base, the foundation of the joy and sheer scope of the music that comes across, and after almost 20 years since the last album to be placed under the Tull name, imagery and illusion return, the weaver of spells in the form of music expression, the notes of the timeless minstrels as they create a world in which to gratefully step, such is the power and suggestion from Ian Anderson, Florian Opahle, David Goodier, John O’Hara and Scott Hammond, that The Zealot Gene is revealed.

The case argued is that Jethro Tull have never really produced songs, rather they are vignettes, long intriguing tales, full blown epics in which the imagination is pushed; sure they have the magic of the flute, they possess instruments galore and the music is quite often to feel as though you are being lulled into a dreamworld of emotional response, but as tracks such as Mine Is The Mountain, Shoshana Sleeping, Barren Beth, Wild Desert John, Where Did Saturday Go?, In Brief Visitation, The Fishermen of Ephesus, and the album’s title track, The Zealot Gene, it is the story, the tale set to a pulse of discerning enchantment that really catches the ear.

Despite the album having started to come together in the January of 2017, the intricate nature, the continued existence of the touring machine, and a pandemic, has meant that it has taken five years for the images, the aural illustrations to come together, and for the group to be recognised once more as being more than just a character, but a symbol of a larger interpretation.

 It is in The Zealot Gene that the minstrels bow to the swathes of appreciative applause, the songs from the wood replaced by an extreme, almost fanatic desire to lay down once more the truth of their power, one of weaving natural beauty, and one in which Jethro Tull, and not just Ian Anderson, is recognised.

Ian D. Hall