Queen Boo

I definitely feel like Yes wanted to show off their new guitarist with The Yes Album because it's their most guitar heavy album and the keyboards are pretty low in the mix compared to the rest of their albums, which probably contributed to Kaye leaving. Kaye was fine but he didn't have the chops Wakeman would bring to the table.

But I'm a huge fan of Howe's guitar playing so I can't complain, I f*cking love The Yes Album and Starship Trooper is one of my favorite songs by the band, though I agree with Synthgirl that Wakeman made it even better live, if only I could find a good quality version with the Anderson/Bruford/Squire/Wakeman/Howe lineup.

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Trollheart

Well I’ll be buggered! I thought it was next, but it isn’t! This is.

Album title: Fragile
Year: 1971
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Rick Wakeman (Grand piano, Hammond, Mellotron, Minimoog), Bill Bruford (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars)
Track by track:

“Roundabout”

What I like about this: Cool intro with some fine gentle guitar from Howe which manages to sound a little Gilmour-like and then gets more sort of medieval in a way as the pace picks up. Good to hear proper keyboards at last.
What I don’t like about this: Nothing really.

“Cans and Brahms”

What I like about this: Nothing
What I don’t like about this: Very indulgent and sounds like church music.

“We Have Heaven”

What I like about this: It’s short
What I don’t like about this: Very annoying: I want to kick him in the nuts just to make him shut up!

“South Side of the Sky”

What I like about this: Nice piano work, vocal harmonies
What I don’t like about this: Opening three minutes or so do nothing for me

“Five Percent for Nothing”

What I like about this: Nothing
What I don’t like about this: Another stupid, indulgent piece of wankery, this time from Squire with a bit of help from Wakeman. Pointless.

“Long Distance Runaround”

What I like about this: Not much
What I don’t like about this: Does nothing for me

“The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)”

What I like about this: Nothing other than the little vocal bit near the end.
What I don’t like about this: Everything; another attempt to show everyone how great Squire is on his bass. Don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but, well, more wank.

“Mood for a Day”

What I like about this: It’s a nice enough little classical guitar piece I guess.
What I don’t like about this: If they can show off, so can I. Sigh.

“Heart of the Sunrise”

What I like about this: Good instrumental intro
What I don’t like about this: Pretty much the rest of it

“We Have Heaven (Reprise)”

What I like about this: Nothing
What I don’t like about this: Everything

Bonus Tracks

“America”

What I like about this: Nothing
What I don’t like about this: Another bloody cover! How can you make a three-minute folk/pop song last ten?? it's overblown, self-indulgent nonsense.



Comments: Ha ha! I’m gonna live! Live, I tells ya! I’m gonna live another day. Another pointless, empty, useless… well, I’m gonna live. I thought Close to the Edge was next, and have already set my affairs in order, but it seems I have a reprieve. Not sure how I made that mistake, but then, as I’d be the first to admit, I’m no expert on this band. This, then, was their fourth album and their first to feature long-time member Rick Wakeman, who replaced Tony Kaye after the keysman did a Peter Banks, but with electronic keyboards instead of orchestras, shaking his head and wondering what was wrong with an organ or a good old piano as he departed, the rest of the band waving goodbye and shouting “See ya in the charts, grandad” possibly.

Again Steve Howe is stamping his identity on the album from the off, but it’s not long before Wakeman is elbowing him to one side and saying “that wuss Kaye wouldn’t play electronic keyboards? They’re the future, man!” and showing just what he can do, which immediately, to my mind anyway, gives this album a more keys-centric presence than any of the previous two. “Roundabout” is more prog too, a nice uptempo song with plenty of arpeggios and a catchy beat, which ended up making it one of Yes’s best-known songs. The guitar riff here would later be used by Howe on the debut Asia album, in the song “Time and Time Again”, and I hear less vocal harmonies here initially, though they do some in there around the midpoint. Shades of “Can-Utility and the Coastliners” here too.

Wakeman then has his first solo composition, a short instrumental which allows him to indulge his love of classical music, based as it is on a Brahms melody, though to be honest and fair it’s not really that great is it? Sounds sort of like something you’d hear in a church at a wedding maybe. Comes across as really indulgent, but then, that would be one of the accusations levelled at Yes, and other prog bands, and the accusers would not be wrong. Another short one in an Anderson-solo-penned song, “We Have Heaven” which has a very annoying rapidly-repeating line in it and doesn’t do anything for me at all I’m afraid, but at least it’s short enough to be over before I have to say “Shut the **** up Jon!” And we’re into “Southside of the Sky”, which seems to display that bugbear for me with this band: I just can’t get my head interested in it and it seems to just ramble on and on without any real structure I can see. Oh wait: stopping now with a nice slow piano melody. That’s something.

Some close-harmony singing now which does help to put more of a shape on the song, as the piano keeps the melody, though it’s getting harder and more insistent now, but then the vocals fade out and it’s just Wakeman and a sort of classical piano line, then wind effects and it’s like a reprise of the opening minutes, which sort of bookends the track, for me, with two poor sections and allows it to finish badly. It’s kind of Howe’s somewhat histrionic playing that ruins it for me, just as I was beginning to like it. Would have been better leaving Wakeman in control. Then we get another pointless piece of showoffery from Squire on “Five Percent for Nothing”, which to me is just nonsense, the next three all short and written respectively by Anderson, Squire and Howe solo, so you know what to expect. Anderson’s is “Long Distance Runaround” and is a bouncy little ditty with a sort of staggered melody line, while the crazily-named “The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)” is of course a vehicle for Squire to wank all over his bass, and wanker supreme Steve Howe gets “Mood for a Day”, unsurprisingly demonstrating his skill on the guitar.

We finally get to grips with a proper track on the longest, ten minutes plus of “Heart of the Sunrise”, a big powerful instrumental intro which takes us into the third minute before Anderson’s vocal comes in very low and quiet, and I guess for a ten-minute track it goes in pretty quickly, though again much of it passes me by. I always felt that Yes, to me, made more about creating instrumental sections without making any memorable melodies. Probably just me, but very little from this album has stuck with me, and I include your precious “Roundabout” in that. I simply could not sing one of the tracks here if my life depended on it. To me, this is more an album of people - undeniably talented musicians, but that doesn't excuse or justify it - showing how clever and talented they are, without too much regard for actual songs.

This album was the first whose cover was designed by Roger Dean, who would become as synonymous with Yes as Derek Riggs was with Iron Maiden or Mark Wilkinson with Marillion. He also designed the now iconic and still used logo for the band.


Rating: 4/10
Yes or No? No


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hE7HZCVVRU

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DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

IMO South Side of the Sky is Yes' very best song. It does have structure: A beginning (which itself has an intro), a middle section (the vocals), and an end, which is a reprise of the beginning.

If you're looking for structured, predictable, verse-chorus songs, then Yes isn't going to be your band.

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DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

For nerds. The big thing I love about Yes is that there's just so much going on all at once in their music, it's like this musical cornucopia just completely overwhelming you and you gotta sit there and try to take it all in and pick it apart.



FYI this is where "Cans and Brahms" comes from.

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Trollheart

I'm pretty much not a Yes fan, I've already made that clear. I'm not really even trying to get into the stuff of theirs I don't know with this thread, I'm just trying to a) confirm I don't like it b) give it a decent chance to maybe change my mind and c) show why I don't like it. I love the albums I love - 90125, Big Generator, Union, ABWH - and have heard little after those. I may end up being a fan of, say, Tormato or Fly from Here or Magnification: who knows? But what I hear on Fragile is mostly what I don't like about Yes: a band mostly showing off how clever they are without writing memorable music. In my opinion.

And also, even Wakeman hates that Brahms thing. I thought it was bloody awful.

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DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

I agree the Brahms thing was pretty much a throwaway. The 2 songs that really carry Fragile are Roundabout and South Side of the Sky. We Have Heaven is good, but it's almost not supposed to be a standalone song as much as it is a frame for the songs it surrounds.

But songs like Heart of the Sunrise are really only going to be appreciated by people who like complex, unstructured things. It's also definitely a song that's probably there as much because it's fun for the musicians to play as it is for the listeners to listen to. In fact, I think a lot of prog is like that - music for the benefit of the musicians as much as it is for the listeners, if not moreso.

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DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

I'm also going to reiterate what I said several posts back - for a lot of Yes you just have to listen to it different. It's more like you're listening to jazz than rock.

You should listen to this ...



... kinda the same way you'd listen to this:



Anyway, to each his own, as they say.

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DriveYourCarDownToTheSea

It just occurred to me that the scales in parts of Long Distance Runaround are almost the same as the scales in the middle part of South Side of the Sky.

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Queen Boo

My biggest disagreement with Troll so far, Fragile is my second favorite Yes album and yes I enjoy the solo tracks too, hell The Fish is one of my favorite tracks on the album, I don't think it's wank at all, it starts out very simple and only becomes more complex as it builds up with each bass overdub carefully layered over each other and I think it sounds f*cking awesome specially when the vocals come in, also the way Howe's guitar solo at the end of Long Distance Runaround segues into it is really cool.

Even Cans and Brahms is pretty charming in it's own kitschy way even if it is the weakest moment on the album, the reason Wakeman chose to cover Brahms for his solo track is because he was still signed with another label as a solo artist and wasn't able to have songwriting credits on the album so he couldn't use one of his own compositions.

Roundabout is a track everyone agrees is great but Heart of the Sunrise is the real highlight for me and it's the one that comes closest to the symphonic sound they would achieve with the next album which I'm well aware Troll also dislikes, I don't agree at all that it's lacking in structure or memorable melodies, there's a neat new hook being added like every 30 seconds, I admit the first time I heard it I thought the transitions from one section to another were too abrubt but the more I listened to it the more I realized how it all came together. It's one of my favorite Yes songs.

Also their cover of America is great, I wish they did more covers because the way they did covers was just use the original song as a jumping off point to go into an extended jam, kinda like what Phish does all the time. Could you imagine Yes covering Louie Louie or something? That would be hilarious.

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Trollheart

Ah, how many times have I heard that from the ladies?

Seriously though, I really think I've laid my stall out from the beginning as to how I see Yes, and I think anyone who's expecting an epiphany here is going to be disappointed. As I said to DYC, it's possible I may like the later albums, but up to 90125 or maybe Drama (not sure about that one, think I heard it once and don't recall being impressed) I'm pretty much a non-Yes fan. Of course other people will get things I don't from this band, and from the earlier albums, and to be fair, anyone who doesn't like Close to the Edge is really unlikely to be swayed by other albums, nomsayin? Which is kind of odd, to me, that I got so much into their later material, as I really think, on the face of it, this is a band I could hate, or at least not like, similar to ELP and maybe Caravan, bands whom a prog head should like, but I don't.

And yet, those Horn-produced albums and the few occurring in the short space of time from 1983 - 1991, love them. After that, really don't know. I recall being disappointed with The Ladder and after that I didn't bother. So who knows? But classic Yes, um, no, so far, mostly. Also, the idea of DYC comparing them to jazz actually says a lot, since as you all know, I am no fan of that genre. So maybe there's a reason why I don't like these early albums.

Nevertheless, everyone is entitled to their opinion, as am I, but I am not ever, not with Yes or any other band, going to pretend I like an album just because it's seen that I should. Or to be liked. Well, obviously: that particular ship has not only sailed but been decommissioned and turned into a trendy restaurant.

Oh, and also: I would certainly challenge the contention that "all prog is bands being clever for themselves rather than write memorable music", or whatever the quote was. Genesis don't do that. Rush don't do that. Marillion don't do that. I could go on. I will. Arena don't do that. Nor do Mostly Autumn, Fish on Friday, Red Sand, Millennium, Haken, Jadis, Threshold....

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