It would be technically incorrect to say "longtime listener, first time caller" since I've posted a handful of times here under different names over the years, but in spirit, yes, this is an out-of-nowhere wall of text from someone who doesn't even Go Here, sorry!

Y'know, it was this site (along with Starostin's and Michael Lawrence's) that, when I was a 13-year-old zoomer, programmed me to adopt the decidedly Gen-X music nerd philosophy that melody trumps all as a decider of quality in pop and rock music. And though I've tried to shake that notion as I've gotten older and expanded my tastes beyond the canon the WRC provided me as a young person, I don't think I've ever managed to really unlearn it. Case in point, when I listened to (and disliked) A Passion Play earlier this year I predictably concluded that, even accounting for the issues with arrangements and overall cohesion, a sizeable portion of the record's not-good-ness simply came down to relatively lower-quality melodies and riffs (which of course are just little loopy melodies). I particularly singled out the introductory jig as well as the first riff of the riff-fest adjoining "...to see you in the passion play" to "Lover of the black and white..." as particularly illustrative of the compositional issues, thinking that they were both exactly the kind of uninspired, overnotey sludge that you'd expect an ego-heavy pseudoprog band to churn out when forced to write and record a concept album in just two weeks.

So it was quite a shock to my aesthetic system to give the Chateau D'isaster tapes a closer relisten yesterday (rather than just continuing to spin the "Scenario/Audition/No Rehearsal" trio ad nauseam) and learn that not only do both of these musical ideas predate A Passion Play proper, but they also both totally work for me in their original forms contained within "Animelee" (or "Tiger Toon" on Nightcap) and "Critique Oblique" respectively. When presented with clarity in arrangement and conviction in performance like this I buy them 100% -- they're not the greatest bits of music Tull came up with or anything but it's instantaneously evident that they came from the same well of inspiration from which they drew all their best early work. And so I can't help viewing it as a failure (or at the very least a laziness) on my part to have decided that those sections of APP sucked mainly because their "raw material" sucked -- that Tull must have simply picked the wrong pitches and note values -- when in fact it all came down to presentation: to performance, to timbre, to everything I trained my younger self to think of as surface level details. In a way, it was informal experimental confirmation of what I'd subconsciously known for a while: that "The most important part of music is what isn't the notes" applied just as much for the proggiest of proggers as it did for Dylan.

In fact, I think that "what isn't the notes" in academically aspirational music like prog rock can be so influential as to potentially distort one's ability to even discern the objective reality of what is the notes. If I can be forgiven for using John's 20-plus-year-old writing to make this point on his own message board, I'd like to spotlight his Nightcap review for a moment:

"I mean, for me, this album is what Passion Play would sound like if it were good; there are a few themes here that would end up on APP, but they're all themes that I liked on the album, and they're attacked in such a way that I can't help but be mesmerized all the way through. The greatest passage for me is 'Critique Oblique,' where the 'Lover of the Black and White' chunk (which has always been my favorite part of APP by far) serves as the basis for nine-plus minutes of unbelievably incredible PRIME TULL jamming. Add in the next track, 'Post Last,' which is essentially an extension of the jam (with some other PP themes), and you have a long long period of some of the greatest Tull ever."

This makes it sound like the nine-minute "Critique Oblique" jam is basically the best riff/melody from APP being milked for all it's worth. But as I alluded to earlier, it's really a bunch of different pre-composed riffs arranged into a sizzle reel which would, in almost this exact compositional form, end up on side one of APP. It's just that on APP that sizzle reel is performed stiffly on sterile-sounding guitars and saxes and synths at about 85% of its original speed, which suckifies the material so much that I'd forgive anyone for not noticing that the original version as presented on Nightcap is, theoretically, the exact same piece of music (and for only starting to recognize it as Passion Play material by the time of the "Post Last" reprise).

But even if we do make that mistake (I certainly did on first listen) and continue to make similar ones forevermore as hobbyist critics, I submit that we can still save a bit of face when critiquing dodgy works by allowing at least a bit more room than we might've for the possibility that their compositional dimensions may only be minor issues, or perhaps even non-issues altogether. The Passion Play review gets partway there by thoroughly noting the arrangement and performance problems, though it implicitly relegates them to a secondary role, with the theoretical written score still taking its default precedence:

"The instrumental passages are longer than on Brick, but they are almost uniformly extremely boring, and lack the Tommyesque type of repetition that made the Brick ones work. You know, take a couple of solid musical themes, tweak them, mess with the rhythm, play them loudly one place and softly another, and bring it all together in the end. Here, they just keep droning on and on, and when you factor in Ian's extensive use of synthesizers, which he just couldn't write for very well (see: 'Play In Time'), as well as the way that Martin just doesn't sound anywhere near as alive as he did on previous albums (in fact, where the hell is he? It almost sounds like he's not even there until the middle of side two), and you get a fully tedious experience."

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Anyway, that's far more than enough from me. I hope all this isn't taken as a personal rebuke of John or any of his peers' work -- I hold a deep affection for this little pocket of the older internet which so formed me as a younger listener, and sharing my developing feelings on the music and philosophy that defines that pocket is my way of giving back to it, I suppose. Actually, the occasion for all this babble is that I'm working on a stupid little fan-edit of A Passion Play (which reduces the record as released down to a standard 23-ish-minute prog epic and populates the other theoretical side of vinyl with Chateau material that wasn't cannibalized for APP), and that would perhaps be a more palatable offering than this, lol. Will share it here when it's done if there's any interest.

I know discussions are sparse on here these days but I'd love to hear others' thoughts on A Passion Play, or on how important melody or other compositional elements really are or aren't, or anything even tangentially related, really. Hope John and everyone are well, happy holidays and everything <3