With
Alan Parsons in the booth and the
London Philharmonic Orchestra backing your band, what could go wrong? A lot, as it turns out. This album was roundly panned upon its release, and time has not proven the critics wrong. The band and the orchestral arrangements take no chances, and that's precisely the problem: if you lived in a Roger Dean landscape, this would be the music playing in the elevators. There are a few bright spots in the passable renditions of "Mood for a Day" and "Heart of the Sunrise," and an interesting reworking of "Soon." But the rest of the album really is just appalling. It's too bad that these twee renditions of the hits has probably put
Yes off such projects; if they'd only had the guts to take on a dissonant interpretation of something like "Tales From Topographic Oceans," they may have had something to show for it. ~ Paul Collins