Great surprise: the cover is a nice digi-pack cardboard and very bright colors make it much better than the Amazon presentation. Roger Dean painting is fresh, friendly, but not a masterpiece. The "zebra" logo is against rather bad taste.
Alas, the packaging is the only good surprise of this album and the music it will simply pop songs tucked nicely coated with sauce Yes. Jon Davison the new singer is quite convincing in his imitation of his almost namesake Jon Anderson (they could push the humor to hire Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, it would have been more original!). The stamp similarity is amazing especially in the treble, with that same particular sailing (perhaps the Harmonizers thank you?), But less resemblance in the midrange and the setting up rhythm and diction are less clear (I wonder anyway what mister Anderson must think when listening this: he must laugh yellow!).
Instrumentally, it has the right to bare minimum: Steve Howe is always the most brilliant, but the weight of years is more acutely felt. Chris Squire on bass purrs softly, the famous Rickenbacker to hook rack. At the battery Alan White seems a little sleep. By cons Geoff Downes on keyboards is quite unconvincing: stereotyped play, simplistic arpeggios, right hand left pretty, very typical 80's sound, not even a beautiful mellotron from his store!
The compositions are quite bland, harmonically quite poor, it is far from the heyday of the seventies supported, but, it's been quite some time that we knew. Stop looking odd metrics, 35/16 of Awaken, with age we are content just to count to four!
I put three stars because ultimately I like the grandpas, and then it may be the last ... (finally some say)
