Jethro Tull - Essential (2011)

Jethro Tull were a unique phenomenon in popular music history. Their mix of hard rock, folk melodies, blues licks, surreal, impossibly dense lyrics, and overall profundity defied easy analysis, but that didn't dissuade fans from giving them 11 gold and five platinum albums. At the same time, critics rarely took them seriously, and they were off the cutting-edge of popular music by the end of the '70s. But no record store in the country would want to be without multiple copies of each of their most popular albums (Benefit, Aqualung, Thick as a Brick, Living in the Past), or their various best-of compilations, and few would knowingly ignore their newer releases. Of their contemporaries, only Yes could claim a similar degree of success, and Yes had endured several major shifts in sound and membership by the '90s, while Tull remained remarkably stable over the same period. As co-founded and led by wildman/flutist/guitarist/singer/songwriter Ian Anderson, the group carved a place all its own in popular music.