Homo Erraticus
| Homo Erraticus | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Ian Anderson | ||||
| Released | 14 April 2014 | |||
| Recorded | January 2014 | |||
| Genre | Progressive rock | |||
| Length | 51:57 | |||
| Label | Kscope | |||
| Ian Anderson chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    |
| Sputnik Music | |
Homo Erraticus is the sixth studio album by British progressive rock musician Ian Anderson, former frontman of Jethro Tull. Released on 14 April 2014, Homo Erraticus is a concept album, loosely connected to Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick (1972) and Anderson's Thick as a Brick 2 (2012), since it again credits the lyrics to the fictional character .
The album was released in four formats: as a double vinyl, a single CD, a CD + DVD collection, and an Amazon.com exclusive box set edition, containing the album on CD as well as three bonus discs.
Anderson and his band embarked on a promotional tour of the album, in which they performed the entire album for the first half of each show, and the best of Jethro Tull for the second half.
Homo Erraticus is a progressive rock album which, according to Anderson, blends folk and medieval as well as heavy metal music styles.Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic called the album "as close to 1970s progressive rock as is possible in 2014".
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 , a literary child prodigy. Details of the album's fictional story are provided, but also slightly contradicted, by two official sources: the Jethro Tull website and the album's own promotional website.
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the year 2014, poet Gerald Bostock, now in his early fifties, has recently discovered in his town's bookstore a "dusty, unpublished manuscript, written by local amateur historian Ernest T. Parritt, (1873 -1928)" which is entitled either "Homo Britanicus Erraticus" or "Homo erraticus (The St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". Apparently, two years before his death, Parritt began suddenly recalling visions of past-life experiences, attributed either to the fact that "Parritt had a traumatic fall from his horse" or "Parritt suffered from a recurrence of malaria, contracted during his Army days in India". In either case:
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