Ian Anderson's Homo Erraticus

Author

By Andrew Hamlin

Publish Date

July 12, 2014

Ian Anderson’s second solo album since quietly deep-spacing the Jethro Tull band moniker, and to boot his third excursion into his avatar Gerald Bostock, a child prodigy turned troubled adult. Only this time Bostock mostly stands in for deep-time, since Homo Erracticus stretches

back to circa 6200 B.C.E. and ends here, now, honoring a rough chronology but flying forth and back as the master pleases, often to the tune of his Pied Piper silver aerophone.

Bostock may be dissolved in the ages, but other honored Tull trademarks represent. That flute, of course, and the surge of electric organ through the deeper tradition of U.K. folk dancing, not to mention U.K. folks’ foibles in fable. The craggy, ruined vagabond from Aqualung and elsewhere, peered out over binoculars from the cover of 1979’s Stormwatch, gloating as a tempest overtook an oil rig. Thirty-five years later, oil rigs are blown, seas are rising, we’re deeper in goop than previously conceptualized, even as the disc reminds how trouble’s been with us always. We’ve just moved onto bigger, more dangerous toys.