This album has the distinction of being called overblown... by Rick Wakeman.
What a polarizing album if there ever was one. It's a love it or hate it kinda album and even the most diehard Yes fans are divided by it. I personally love it, people think theres not enough going on to warrant 20 minute long songs, but I disagree, I've always prefered Yes's longer songs and if any prog band can pull of a whole album of ridiculously long songs it's Yes, their songwriting was certainly getting better and more original.
The overblown factor here is that it's a double album with 4 tracks that all clock in around 20 minutes, I think it could have done without the rather wanky The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun), but the other tracks are near perfect and it's some of the best melodicism the band has ever done. I never understood the downright hate for this album, I think rock suites are a great concept, Pink Floyd did the same thing a year later on WWYH with Shine On You Crazy Diamond after all.
A lot of people say this album is overprodued, and maybe so, though I prefer to think of overproducing as trying to mask flaws in the musicianship, but Yes were never the kind of band that was trying to be "raw" or "real" or anything like that, they always tried to make albums that gave a completely different experience from everything else, and like it or not they certainly achieved that here. I love the rather bizzare sound they created here, the great amount of resonance that was the result of the band covering the studio with tiles to give it the acoustics of a bathroom and honestly I don't see the pretenses of this album being any more off the wall than Pet Sounds was in 1966.
Either way, this was the album that unfortunately gave prog it's long reputation of bloatedness and pretentiousness.
But I've always been drawn to the more theatrical and mystical side of rock music, so I don't mind a little pomposity, or a lot of it. Overblown? Hell yes. But for prog thats usually a very positive thing.