FRAGILE

People on this site often tend to judge albums as if the entire progressive catalogue has always existed, but in understanding any kind of music, it's important to put yourself in the time frame of the music at the time it happened. In 1972, I was 14 years old, and received "Fragile" through an otherwise very commercial Record-of-theMonth Club. I can only say today, it was as if a light went off in my tiny teenage brain, and perhaps life was never the same after that. Of course, today these sounds and influences have been recycled and rehashed to death by all the clone bands worshipped on these pages, but it's easy to forget the fact that somebody had to INVENT that stuff in the first place. The sound of "Fragile", when it came out was as new and shocking at the time as say, "Deloused in the Crematorium", by the Mars Volta is today. The hard, cutting yet melodic bass sound wrought by master Squire tightly coupled with Bruford's ringing snare and inventive syncopation, Howe's stinging guitar architectonics, all this did not exist before Fragile. The concept album was in its infancy, having been trail-blazed by Zappa, Magma, the Kinks and the Beatles (without whom none of us would be reading these pages), and Yes would deliver some of the finest examples in their next three, but to underestimate the importance of this album would be a misreading of the developments that lead to what we ackwardly label "progressive" music. Even with its admitted weaknesses (Wakeman's Brahms outting especially) "Fragile" was a revolutionary step forward that most bands could only dream of.