Album Review: Jethro Tull, "The Zealot Gene"

At first I was gonna say, “Haha, you stupid rubes! The Zealot Gene is just an Ian Anderson solo album! This emperor has no codpiece!”

Then I realized that we all got taken for a ride; in 2012, Anderson released a solo album called Thick as a Brick 2 and followed it with Homo Erraticus in 2014; and both of those were done by the same lineup that did The Zealot Gene.

So, if Ian Anderson, NOT Jethro Tull, released a sequel to the 1972 Jethro Tull classic Thick as a Brick, and the new Jethro Tull album features the same exact band that did Thick as a Brick 2 and Homo Erraticus, then is not the geriatric Anton LaVey looking bloke on the cover of the so called new Jethro Tull album laughing at us and saying:

“I was Jethro Tull the entire time, you fools! Not former guitarist Martin Barre nor former drummer Clive Bunker nor other former drummer Barriemore Barlow nor former bassist Jeffrey Hammond (no relation to current drummer Scott Hammond) nor any of those bozos I made any of our albums with, up through The Jethro Tull Christmas Album in 2003! It was me, Ian Anderson, the funny British singer and flautist, the entire time!”

Ya know what’s kind of ironic about the previous paragraphs? Guitarist Florian Opahle, who played on Thick as a Brick 2, Homo Erraticus, and The Zealot Gene, isn’t even in Jethro Tull anymore! Ah, how the winds of fate play many a fine joke on us. Also, Ian Anderson decided to include a “humorous” paragraph in the liner notes full of self-righteous proselytizing disguised as “observations” about the “ultra-conservatism” and “populism” he’s witnessed in our culture over the last few years, further reflected in these lyrics to the title track:

The populist with dark appeal

The pandering to hate

Which xenophobic scaremongers

Deliver on a plate

To tame the pangs of hunger

And satisfy the lust

Slave to ideology

Moderation bites the dust

Oh, shut the fuck up and play your flute, old man; done nobody wanna listen to you blabber about your political views!

Regarding the flute, however, I quite enjoy this wussy woodwind instrument from medieval times played by guys who wear gay tights; after, all, I’m into KING CRIMSON, HAWKWIND, and VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR, and I love Renaissance fairs, so yeah, I love Tull. And, if you’re a Jethro Tull or (rolls eyes) an Ian Anderson fan, you’ll most likely enjoy The Zealot Gene as well.

So, what do we got here? Well, The Zealot Gene has twelve new tracks, most of which are about three to four minutes long, with only two even approaching six minutes. So, it’s clear that, for the most part, Anderson/Tull just wanted to knock out one song after another for 47 minutes rather than treating the listener to really long, multi-part progressive epics that take up a side of an LP. And, of the twelve, you basically get all your different types of Jethro Tull songs.

Hell, the album opens with the A-era, synth-filled new wave-y hard rock of “Mrs. Tibbets” and then goes right into the two minute acoustic guitar and harmonica number “Jacob’s Tale.” After that, the album alternates between heavier rock tunes with the playful, sing-songy, skipping through the forest vibe, such as “Shoshana’s Sleeping” (I actually dated a girl named Shoshana in high school! She had huge tits!), a sadder and slower heavy rock tune with piano called “Mine Is a Mountain”, and several acoustic folk numbers that evoke images of serene fields and pretty mountainsides.

Or the songs do that typical Jethro Tull thing, where the verse is soft and folky, and then there’s the big, dramatic buildup and crescendo of sorts, and then the song gets all loud and rockin’, but still in that old time-y English way; I mean, the last track “The Fisherman of Ephesus” is total “Bungle in the Jungle” territory, and how can you NOT think of “Cross Eyed Mary” when Anderson sings “cousin Mary” in the song “Barren Beth, Wild Desert John”?

Among other things, there’s some lovely guitar/piano/flute interplay on "The Betrayal of Joshua Kynde", some nice mandolin and accordion on “Sad City Sisters”, and even a song called “Where Did Saturday Go?” with some poignant, open-ended lyrics like “deeply regrettable/somewhat predictable/faintly implausible/quite unmissable/but where did Saturday go?” That’s more like what I want from my aging prog rockers; not their opinions on the matters of the day.

So, yeah, it’s a Tull album, or it isn’t, depending on who you ask.

Edwin Oslan
Revenge of Riff Raff
17th February, 2022

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!