FRAGILE

This album has quite a few interesting tracks. Because each player in the band has their own feature piece, we find a great variety of works, ranging from 30-second bizarre effects to nice guitar solo literature.

The album starts off with Roundabout which is a real classic Yes powerhouse piece, but in the rest of the album we have to work to find that same driving effect anywhere else--in short, the opening track almost shows up the whole rest of the album. the rest of the longer--non "solo"- -tracks seem to lack any sense of power or real musical direction, to me they feel ages long. This is really a disapointment.

This album has a lot of novelty, however. Where else will you find a song dedicated to a Hawaiian fish played with so many bass tracks? Where else can you find a song made with so many vocal tracks you almost forget they're vocal tracks, starting to just think of them as background instruments? Unfortunately for Yes this is not enough to make a great progressive work, even though it is very amusing.

Overall this album comes off to me as a middle-of-the-road work: it has it's strong points, but also it weak points which seem to even it out somewhat. For this middle-of-the-road work, I will give a middle-of-the-road three stars.