Last summer a dear friend of mine bought me a copy of my very first Yes album, Fragile. He knew I’d been listening to a lot of ’70’s rock music and while his own interests tended toward more contemporary music, Fragile was an important album to him when it came out in 1971 and he wanted to turn me on to it. I’m glad he did as it’s a great album and I’ve been listening to it regularly since.
The Yes album of my youth is 90125. It was released in 1983 after the band reformed with a new lineup and pivoted from a progressive rock band featuring conceptual material and virtuosic musicianship to a more pop oriented group favoring more modern studio effects and digital sampling. 90125 was, of course, a huge hit, but it’s Yes’ earlier work, including Fragile, that has stood the test of time.
Fragile was the second album Yes released in 1971. Preceding it was The Yes Album, their third album and the one in which Yes cemented their trademark sound. As Yes albums go, The Yes Album is a bit more of a straightforward rock album than Fragile, which sees the band challenging themselves more creatively and fully realizing their place among other progressive rock bands of the 1970’s.
When first you hear the acoustic guitar during the intro to Roundabout, you just can’t help but get excited. And when the bass guitar kicks in, oh man, it just makes you want to turn up the volume! For me, it’s that bass guitar and the way it was recorded that I love most about this record. And when I started to listen to the album more critically, that’s the instrument that I really wanted to sound most true.
As a listening experience, Fragile gives you quite a bit of ear candy. The acoustic guitar I mentioned during the intro to “Roundabout” is a great example of this, as is the sound at the end of “We Have Heaven” of a door slamming and person running off across the back of an empty room. These are sounds that are wonderfully engaging and just plain fun to listen to.
But Fragile is also an album with quite a few songs and passages that are difficult to reproduce. On “We Have Heaven,” the vocals and the music build to a crescendo that can sound chaotic and washed out. On “Cans and Brahms,” the electric piano and harpsichord can be unbearably bright and harsh. A good pressing of this record is essential, in my opinion, to really enjoy it the way it was meant to be enjoyed.
Like the reissue of The Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow I wrote about a short time ago, the lacquer for this reissued version of Fragile was cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio. For comparison, I purchased an early U.S. pressing for $6 at my favorite local record store. It’s in great shape and plays with very little surface noise. I cleaned it well and was excited to see how it would stack up against this reissued version.
After spending quite a bit of time listening to Fragile, I’ve concluded the litmus test for a good copy is “South Side of the Sky.” There are just so many challenging elements to this song from a playback perspective. As the song opens we can hear right away how the guitar, bass, keyboards and drum symbols are all competing with vocal harmonies. On my vintage copy, all of this threatens to fall into a chaos verging on noise. The reissue manages to keep it all under relative control and that preserves the individual elements, allowing them to coexist and remain in harmony.
About midway through “South Side” there’s a piano section in which the keystrokes are off-the-charts lively with a pronounced echo to them. On my vintage copy, this piano presents too bright and a bit overwhelming. The reissue manages to tone these notes down in a way that emphasizes their musicality rather than their intensity. From there, the song begins building toward its climax, and the vocals again find themselves fighting for air as the other instruments, especially the guitar, close in. The vintage copy holds up to this challenge okay, but again the reissue manages to give the vocals just a sliver of space to exist in the very crowded soundstage and that space makes all the difference.
It seems to me the virtues of this reissue really lie in its ability to convey more details in the music. This more detailed presentation suits a lot of the music on Fragile. There’s so much drama and intensity filling every available nook and cranny in the soundstage that it’s nice to have some details to help keep everything in its place.
But there’s more to the music here than details and with so many electronic elements, it’s nice to have the instruments present to the ear naturally and with spaciousness. The vintage copy does this better as has a more natural sense of instruments living in space. The reissue, while not bad in this regard, does have a heavy assertiveness that favors details leaping out to the ear over a more depth centric presentation that gives the music space to live in.
It’s hard to know which copy to recommend here. I would note that a brand new copy of the 2016 reissue I’ve been discussing will cost you about $25 and for that price I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. It’s a very good sounding record. On the other hand, you can pick up a vintage copy of Fragile that has many of its own virtues to recommend it for less. As I said, I paid $6 for my copy, an early US pressing, and it’s about as close to NM as I think you’ll get with an early ’70’s rock album. There is some surface noise, but not enough to make the decision to spend more for a brand new copy a slam dunk.
I also have a later 70’s US pressing of Fragile that I’d say plays pretty similar to the early pressing. Later pressings are a bit cheaper than the early US pressings in NM condition so I’d say they are a safe bet if you decide to buy a vintage copy and you want more options. I have not heard any UK versions, but it will definitely cost you more, and the folks discussing this album on the forums don’t seem to be giving a definitive nod to a UK pressing.
The version most people seem to prefer actually is the 2006 Kevin Gray / Steve Hoffman remastered version for Analogue Productions. There are not a ton of these for sale and I expect you’d be lucky to get one for less than $60, but they do appear to inspire enthusiasm.
Here’s a link to a SH forum discussion for more input:
http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/yes-fragile-vinyl-comparisons.311596/#post-8619418
UPDATE:
I wrote this post a long time back. My stereo has improved pretty dramatically since, and I feel very differently now about the Kevin Gray recut now than I did then. I can still stand behind some of my comments on how the vintage copy of Fragile I had a more “natural” sound to it, but that’s about it.
It wasn’t long after I wrote this post that improvements I made to my system began to show the many shortcomings of this 2016 reissue and I sold it off. Even a decent early pressing will easily beat it.
I also never use Steve Hoffman Forums for advice on vinyl pressings. It’s very rare to find someone there who can offer good advice on which pressing of a given title is likely to sound the best as most of the posters there follow pretty conventional wisdom.
Also, you’ll almost never find someone on that forum who is open to the idea of Hot Stampers and how much they have to offer us audiophile collectors. And any analog audiophile who dismisses Hot Stampers is not someone who can be relied upon for good advice.