Homo Erraticus - Ian Anderson

Homo Erraticus (Ian Anderson, 2014)

Part One:  Chronicles
1. Doggerland - 4:21
2. Heavy Metals - 1:33
3. Enter The Uninvited - 4:12
4. Puer Ferox Adventus - 7:13
5. Meliora Sequamur - 3:35
6. The Turnpike Inn - 3:08
7. The Engineer - 3:12
8. The Pax Britannica - 3:05

Part Two: Prophecies
9. Tripudium Ad Bellum - 2:50
10. After These Wars - 4:29
11. New Blood, Old Veins - 2:32

Part Three: Revelations
12. In For A Pound - 0:37
13. The Browning Of The Green - 4:06
14. Per Errationes Ad Astra - 1:34
15. Cold Dead Reckoning - 5:31

Apparently Gerald Bostock is Ian Anderson's progressive rock muse. The concept here: Bostock finds an old book written by local St. Cleve looney Ernest Parritt in which he chronicles all his past and future lives in a sweeping panorama of the history of Britain and the folly of man. Backed by the same band as Thick As A Brick 2, Anderson completely astounds me with this exciting, complex, and epic creation.

Like TAAB2, the songs here are parts of a grand whole, with certain musical themes, transitions, and inversions linking things together. Unlike TAAB2, I detect no nostalgic musical nods - this is a boldly creative album in the style of the best progressive rock. Anderson and his band up the ante: the rock songs rock harder, the pretty songs are gorgeous, and everything in between is more ornate, more lyrical, more modern yet more Baroque. This is the work of an expert, whose musical sense has improved with age.

Witness the flute-driven hard rock of "Doggerland", the dense stream-of-consciousness lyrics of "Enter The Uninvited", the moving portrait of Jesus in "Puer Ferox Adventus", the rollicking romp of "Pax Britannica", the twisty, gnarly instrumental "Tripudium Ad Bellum", the aggressive closer "Cold Dead Reckoning" - all around this is an exciting ride from start to finish. The band flesh out Anderson's compositions with creative aplomb, and Anderson's lyrics constitute some of his strongest and most stirring poetry.

While I enjoy certain songs on the latter-day Tull albums, I had mostly given up on anything really new and exciting coming from Jethro Tull or Ian Anderson.  With the one-two punch of Thick As A Brick 2 and Homo Erraticus, Anderson proves me so very wrong by crafting two modern progressive rock classics.

Arbitrary rating: 5 out of 5 sweeping panoramas