Hello! I bought my The Eye last week at a local (Turku, Finland) recordstore for 20 euros (they even had the single for 6 euros, which I didn't buy, because it mainly contains remixes by other people. I don't know if they ship records outside Finland, at least you would have to understand Finnish in order to use the order form, which probably is a restricting factor globally (www.kane.fi)), and after listening it through a few times, I want to share my views of it. Over all, the album is quite slow and peaceful, there are no real faster songs, like there have usually been. The sounds are very polished and soft. Somebody pointed out, that the album that most resembles this is One Second, and I can see their point. Also in One Second, the album consisted of distinct songs, not almost continuous soundscapes, as in Solid Pleasure for example. This has probably to do with the fact, that there are so many songs with Jade Davies. In One Second and other albums as well, songs which had visitings singers were not as adventurous as the purely Yello songs. Ms. Davies, I think has a beautiful voice, but it's very neutral and lacks a little in depth and especially personality. She doesn't have any annoying mannerisms, but not much interpretation either. The tranquility of the album has its plusses, but it also bothered me a little. I like Yello's 80's stuff the most, and there they usually had these "crazy" songs, which were anything but tranquil, and necessary to really appreciate the finesse of the quieter moments. I listened to One Second after The Eye for comparison, and there were for example "Si Senor the Hairy Grill", which I think is a piece of genious, that only Yello can achieve. There are also fine "normal" songs in One Second, like "Call it Love" and "The Rhythm Divine". It's really sad that we won't hear Billy MacKenzie in any more Yello albums. The Eye has many beautiful moments, my favourite song (at this moment) is "Distant Solutions", it's like a beautiful dream that you don't want to wake up from. But some of the songs seem to lack an identity or purpose. And of course there's Akufen's awful version of Planet Dada, which is really out of place in this album and competes quite evenly for the position of my least favourite song on a Yello album with "Oh Yeah". Also in general, remixes of Yello songs are almost never good, the only one that I really like is Cosmic Baby's version of Dr van Steiner (excluding some of the excellent remixes published on this list). Overall, I'd rank this album worse than Motion Picture, which I think is Yello's best post-80's album, and compares very well with their earlier stuff, but it's better than Zebra or Pocket Universe. It seems like thay had a creative low point in the early 90's but are picking it up again. Maybe it was because of getting children etc. But it seems that Dieter has less and less to do with the albums. That's a big change since the 80's, when he seemed to put more effort into it. Listening to the older albums, he was more alive then. -- Jussi Salmi http://staff.cs.utu.fi/~jussalmi/