THE STORY OF I

Keyboardist Patrick Moraz, well-known from his work in the band YES during Relayer era was releasing with The Story of I his first solo album after his demise from YES. It's a piece of work that is regarded as masterly by some people whereas others including me cannot really appreciate this stuff presented here.

Actually this record is starting quite good and promising: dark mellotron tunes, piano lines and bass interludes, whistling synths and some latin percussion in the back. This quite unique blend seams to work still in the first track Impact. But after this one the album really starts to become annoying. Obviously Patrick Moraz used to love a lot latin american rhythms and so he was trying here to integrate a complete brazilian percussion group into this album with the result of a catastrophic failure. Just because most of the music is rather rooted in the western "white" pop-rock style, so the whole album is sounding in some way not coherent at all, more like an arbitrary patchwork. Moreover many parts are very much reminiscent to Broadway music.Nevertheless there are a few positive moments, like Intermezzo in the beginning quite reminiscent to RENAISSANCE, then the song is shifting to a latin rhythm section followed by a rather complex final part a bit similar to parts of Gates Of Delirium. Indoors is a rather good jazz-fusion track , Impressions has a nice piano solo and Rise And Fall has some nice parts and tunes as well.

Musicianship is in fact very good throughout, especially bass player Jeff Berlin is showing a great effort on his very first record. But due to the incoherent and failed composition (at least in my view) this album cannot be regarded as a worthy recommendation. Don't expect anything similar to any releases made by YES from this one! I can't rate it higher than with 2 1/2 stars!