THICK AS A BRICK

Reading the reviews above I don't conceive how many people would call this one "boring" and then praise Close To The Edge. Surely, Thick As A Brick is repetitive, but Close To The Edge also falls short of ideas after a while and you get about 6 or 7 minutes of pure piano rambling without much direction, seemingly just stretching the song so that they could compete with the rest of the "prog" scene.

Don't get me wrong, Yes has a lot of musicianship and they can surely arrange great harmonies, but they also tend to drag some of their songs beyond measure.

Now to the actual review: I give it 5 stars, because quite frankly, whilst A Passion Play has grown on me a bit more, this one is a bit better in terms of arrangements, and you could actually listen to more themes than on APP plus the synths are not all over the place (if there are synths at all). On the other hand, this one has Anderson's marvelous vocals a bit drowned with naive production; or perhaps it's just his singing in this album that's not particularly good.

But this is surely a masterpiece, a bit flawed but, hell, Selling England By The Pound has "More Fool Me", thus I think it's a draw between the two, despite the musical contrasts.