Schindleria Praematurus

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

28/11/71 : Fragile - Yes

This is our second or third visit with Yes (their choice of name makes it very hard to search for posts that are about them) and I've generally quite liked their sound, even if it's not exactly my sort of thing.

Hmmm. I don't mind the general sound (it's surprisingly funky in places) but it's all a bit unnecessarily noodle-y in places. I'm sure they'd argue they knew exactly what they were doing and every note was required, but I call bullshit on that. Things could have been far worse though and I particularly liked "Long Distance Runaround" - it also feels like one of those albums that multiple listens would bring out new things. But that doesn't mean it will be getting multiple listens.

We're at #7 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a three week run, with this being as high as it got - however, it did come back after a month's break for a ten week run, which seems a most peculiar way of going about things. The top five this week were Led Zeppelin, Top Of The Pops Vol 20, Emerson, Lake & Palmer (another new entry), John Lennon and T Rex, with the next highest new entry being Jimi Hendrix (#16) - Rainbow Bridge, which is apparently his best posthumous album.

Wikipedia has a surprising amount (215 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is their fourth album and features a line-up change with Tony Kaye having left the band because he didn't want to play electronic keyboards - he was replaced by Rick Wakeman, who doesn't seem to have any issues doing so. It also tells me something I missed that seems mad, which is that only four of the tracks are actually by the band, with the five others being solos by band members - this was done due to time and budget constraints. 

The other main fact of interest is that it's their first album cover done by Roger Dean - he's done many of them since and his art certainly seems to fit their vibe. Critically, it was pretty well received with Circus describing it as "unquestionably their most cohesive and mettlesome undertaking" (and I didn't even know that was a word!). Commercially, it did very well in a few countries, getting to #8 in The Netherlands, #6 in Canada and #4 in the US, selling two million copies over there, which is a very decent effort.

discogs.com tells us you're going to have to spend a fiver to get an original copy of this, but there are some interesting versions you can drop some cash on if you want to - £254.98 will get you a test pressing, £280 gets you a mint copy with the original inner (does that matter?) or £649 gets you the 180gm 45rpm double vinyl numbered edition box set re-release from '19. I thought this was nicely of its time and didn't mind this at all in places - I imagine that, back in the day, plenty of people listened to it on repeat to pick up all the nuance that I undoubtedly missed.

05/12/71 - Peculiarly successful