ANIMATION

This album was released when prog music was under crisis as many of prog bands, including YES, went pop. Fortunately, this album is still in the corridor of prog music. Jon's solo albums have always been different with YES. He has a different style of musical creation that I think is a blend of world music and latin music. Ahem .. I probably push to hard in categorizing Jon's music. For the sake of building a "close" or "similar" association with previous albums where Jon was involved, I thing if you have ever heard "Circus of Heaven" of TORMATO album . yeah . it's that kind of music, I think. Even though it's not perfectly the same.

"Olympia" is a very nice opening track with intense latin music components at its interlude. "Animation" is really prog to the corner. Not because of its duration that qualifies it as pog song, i.e. greater to 8 minutes (rule of thumb?), but it has a variety of musical roots. The tempo varies significantly from happy rhythm at the beginning goes softly to a slower tempo. It's a very nice composition.

"Unlearning" intro is similar of any PETER GABRIEL composition. The body of the song is different even though the drum-looping sounds similar. You may recognize how unique John Giblin bass playing style appears at this track. This song has a strong pop touch. One important thing is that at the end of the track, Jon adds traditional GAMELAN BALI deep rooted from Bali Island, Indonesia. It's beautiful closing, I think.

"Boundaries" is a ballad with nice acoustic guitar rhythm and melody. This track was one of my favorites in mid eighties when this album was launched.

Overall, this album is enjoyable. As other Jon's solo albums, don't expect that this album is similar to any YES album. Jon's voice is perfect, backed up with well-known musicians such as Jack Bruce, Simon Phillips, John Giblin, Chris Rainbow and others. - Gatot Widayanto, Indonesia.