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Yes - Fragile CD (album) cover

FRAGILE

Yes

 

Symphonic Prog

4.46 | 4043 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

the philosopher
5 stars My first meeting with Yes was with Tomatoes and I decided that Yes was not my kind of thing. It took at least two years after this that I accidently heard Fragile (Yeah, my parents don't listen to progressive music, so I had to discover it all myself) and I was captured immediatly. I bought this on vinyl and within a few months I owned all essential records of Yes and was amazed about the high standard of their music. Later on when the "hype" was over, I began to see that not everything was gold, but The Yes Album and Fragile always stayed my favourite records and were both released in 1971.

The reason these two records are so good is because these reveal a nice blend of symphonic prog, folk, heavy prog and even more. And although I do like the more epical period (especially Tales of Topographic Oceans) Yes never became so "catchy" anymore. Catchyness never seemed to be a critical point by most prog reviewers, but I think it's more important in music then instrumental outstandingness or even progression on itself, although this record also scores high on these measures.

Fragile is Yes's most fragmentated album, because all members of the band brought in their own composition whereby there own instrumentation is most important. Even Jon Anderson brought in a progressive composition where vocals takes the most attention. At first I didn't like all of it, but it kept on growing on me. Nowadays I like this record as a whole and would not see anything different on it. It's a symphonic prog masterpiece and what I like on it is that it also rocks on some of these tracks. Also the fragmentation could be explained as being diverse, what enhances the listening quality for me. Advised for every fan of progressive music.

the philosopher | 5/5 |

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