Fragile

The album that I am reviewing this week is one of Yes’s best known albums “Fragile”

History

First released in 1971, the album saw pretty large success in both the UK and the US reaching #4 on the US billboards and #7 on the UK billboards. Since its release it has gone 2X Platinum, selling over 2,000,000 copies. When Yes first started recording “Fragile” there was conflict between the pianist Tony Kaye and the rest of the band because he was reluctant to learn any new synthesizers. He was fired early on and quickly replaced by Rick Wakeman. Fun Fact about Rick Wakeman: he was offered to play with David Bowie’s touring band the same say that he was offered to join Yes. He opted for Yes because he figured he’d have more artistic and creative freedom. The band all agrees that Wakeman added another layer to the band and gave them a much “fuller sound”. The cover art was painted by Roger Dean who had painted several of Yes’s covers. It features a world with a large crack in it and a wooden spaceship floating above it. This broken and cracking world and the title “Fragile” reflect how the band was feeling at the time. Thier manager felt like they could break at any moment and this was seen when they fired Kaye.

Review

This album is all over the place, but that is one of the things that makes it so great and is why I love it. Songs like “Five per cent for nothing” is very dissonant and reminds me of a Primus riff, but then it also features funky songs like “Long distance runaround” and a classical piece by the name of “Cans and Brahms (Extracts from Brahms’ 4th symphony in E minor, Third Movement”, what a mouthful. The whole thing is just very experimental which is pretty commonplace in the early 70’s in music. No two songs are alike on the album and it really keeps the listener on the edge of thier seats. Out of all of the crazy songs, none quite reach the scale of the 8 and a half minute epic, “Roundabout”.

Favorite song

Quite arguably Yes’s best song, “Roundabout” is a journey of a song. It starts off with the most recognizable part to most listeners; a quite finger style guitar part that is (almost) entirely alone. It starts to build tension until the 44 second mark where the whole band comes exploding in. The bass is the most prevalent thing to me in most of the song as it has a very funky and slap-y line that goes throughout. The chorus and pre-chorus are incredibly up beat and gets me hyped. Rick Wakeman piano/synth playing is really allowed to shine in this song as he has little flares here and there that add tons of flavor and as the band said, they really do add another level to Yes. At almost the 6 minute mark, a few of the instruments get solos which is really fun to hear in a rock songs as opposed to jazz, where multi-instrument solos are more common. The song is brought to a close by a slowly strummed major chord, which makes it feel very nicely finished. “Roundabout” is the only song over 5 minutes that I can listen to the entirety of and not get bored. Everything in it is just so perfectly excecuted and nothing feels wrong or out of place. Roundabout not just my favorite song on this album, but one of my favorites of all time.