Description
Label Review.
2014 album. New Digipak.
Our Overview.
‘Homo Eracticus’ was the sixth studio album by frontman of prog rockers Jethro Tull’s multi-instrumentalist Ian Anderson and by many considered to be the most fully realised progressive rock concept album in the Jethro Tull repertoire, loosely connected to Jethro Tull’s ’Thick As A Brick’.
In 2012 Ian Anderson released ‘Thick As A Brick 2’, the follow-up to Jethro Tull’s legendary concept album. The album was a critical and commercial success, charting around the world. In April 2014 he returned with the UK top 20 album ‘Homo Erraticus’. The original ‘Thick As A Brick’ album, released in 1972, was based around the poem of disgraced child prodigy Gerald Bostock . For ‘Homo Erraticus’ Anderson is reunited with Bostock, using lyrics written by Gerald based on an old historical manuscript. The manuscript examines key events from throughout British history before going on to offer several prophecies for the future.
The phrase Homo Erraticus is Latin for “wandering man”, and the concept for the album builds tangentially upon the fictional narrative of Ian Anderson’s recurring character Gerald Bostock, a literary child prodigy. The general backstory underlying the album is that, in the year 2014, poet Gerald Bostock, now in his early fifties, has recently discovered in his town’s bookstore a “dusty, unpublished manuscript, written by local amateur historian Ernest T. Parritt, (1873 -1928)” which is entitled either “Homo Britanicus Erraticus” or “Homo Erraticus (The St Cleve Chronicles)”. Anderson claims that the album’s lyrics are Bostock’s resulting interpretation of Parritt’s “illustrated document which summarises key historical elements of early civilisation in Britain and seems to prophesy future scenarios too”. Suitably dramatised and exaggerated by Bostock as metaphors for modern life, he presented Anderson with ideas for 14 songs, which was then set to music. The result was ‘Homo Erraticus’.
Tracklisting:
1. Doggerland
2. Heavy Metals
3. Enter The Uninvited
4. Puer Ferox Adventus
5. Meliora Sequamur
6. The Turnpike Inn
7. The Engineer
8. The Pax Britannica
9.Tripudium Ad Bellum
10. After These Wars
11. New Blood, Old Veins
12. In For A Pound
13. The Browning Of The Green
14. Per Errationes Ad Astra
15. Cold Dead Reckoning