Something Completely Different

The first serious thread ported over from MB. This one will be big, and possible controversial.
(https://i.postimg.cc/SspCmB7Z/image-2023-01-02-185929631.png)

Yes or No? Tales from Trollographic Oceans
Trollheart Dives Deep into the Entire Yes Discography,
Looking for Wondrous Stories and the Owner of a Lonely Heart

One thing that always seems to shock people when they hear I'm a proghead is the fact that I don't particularly care for Yes. That's not quite true of course: anything from the 1980s onwards I do like, but go backwards and there's very little there I'm interested in. It might help those people to realise that I got into music of my own (as opposed to music I could only hear on the radio or through my elder sister's record player or from friends) in around 1980, when I began working and was able to afford my first stereo system. I had heard of Yes, vaguely, but only really came to know them through the hit single "Owner of a Lonely Heart", which played on MTV with a cool video. Even then, meh, I wasn't too bothered about checking out their album, not until my mate Tony played me Big Generator, their twelfth album, and second produced by The Buggles' Trevor Horn. I loved that album, and quickly got into its predecessor 90125, from which the single I mention had come, then tried Drama but didn't think much of it. Tony suggested the one two albums prior to that, 1977's Going for the One, and while yes (no pun intended: this will of course happen a lot) I was impressed by "Wondrous Stories", I just didn't get the album.

So I've been a forward-looking minor fan of Yes, loving those two albums and then the follow-ups, including the all-but-Yes-in-name Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe album, though after the disappointment of The Ladder I stopped listening to their new stuff. I've heard a few tracks in playlists from the later albums; some are good, some are poor. None have really made me want to go and check out the full album. I've also been aware of Jon Anderson, mostly through his association with the late Vangelis, of whom I was a big fan in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the two hit singles they had together, but I heard one of Anderson's solo albums and again I just was underwhelmed.

But I've never really come across a band, particularly a prog rock one, particularly one of THE prog rock ones, which has so sharply divided my opinion along the basis of time periods. Peter Gabriel Genesis or Phil Collins? Like both. Pre or post-Fish Marillion? Love both. Emerson, Lake and Palmer? Hate them. There hasn't been, that I can recall anyway, a band or artist who I've found I love a certain period of their work and don't like the rest. Yes remain as a sort of anachronism in my appreciation of prog, and indeed music. Usually, I either like an artist or I don't, and I can't think of another where I can answer the question "Do you like Yes?" with both answers, having to qualify that answer by asking one of my own: "Do you mean pre or post 1983?"

But it's always been a slight concern to me that I haven't been seen to have given 1970s Yes a proper chance. So, while I am under no illusions this will suddenly make me a fan of early Yes, my intention here is to, if not get into them, at least lay out my reasons and thinking behind my dislike of everything before 90125. At the end of this project, I hope to at least be able to say, with some confidence, that I have tried, have listened to the early stuff, and still don't like it, and if someone does greet me with that air of incredulity, and ask how I can like, say, Union and not Tormato, I will, with some degree of sanguinity, be able to point them to this article for the answers they seek. Or, you know, just tell them to fuck off.

The intention here is, then, to listen to every album in Yes's discography (even the ones I'm familiar with), including any bonus tracks, special mixes, and so forth, and possibly solo efforts too, to do a detailed and descriptive review of each, pointing out its failings in my view, or, if I can, its strengths, and trying to find out and/or explain why a certain album does or does not resonate with me. Comment is invited yadda yaddda see the small print for details, your statutory rights don't exist etc.

One more thing: if you're going to argue with me about this or that album, and try to convince me I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about (I don't) then fuck you. While I'll engage in civilised debate with anyone on any subject, I expect the same sort of courtesy towards my views, and anyone who says something flippant like "You just don't get it" can eat a big one. This is, primarily, a sort of testament to my dislike of seventies Yes, and why I feel like I do. I want to give the albums a fair chance, and I will, but if, as I assume will be the case, I still don't like them then that's it. Don't try to tell me I need to listen to each album 40,309 times, cos I won't be doing that. Remember, I'm not necessarily trying to get into seventies Yes here, just explain and demonstrate why I'm not into that period of their work. So to paraphrase Lord Edmund in Blackadder II, play fair with me and you will find me a considerate reviewer, but if you cross me by Jove! You will find that beneath this playful, boyish exterior beats the heart of a ruthless, sadistic maniac!

And with that, let's go.

As we all know (or if you don't you should) Yes began when one guy met another in a pub, literally. Chris Squire had been playing bass in a band called "Mabel Greer's Toyshop" (doesn't quite have the same ring through, does it? Close to the Edge by Mabel Greer's Toyshop!) but after leaving that band to their obscure destiny he joined up with barman Jon Anderson, and names were bandied around as they tried to come up with a good one for their new band, suggestions ranging from World to Life. The incredibly simple word for the affirmative was settled upon and with Squire leaving behind childish things, as it were, and the addition of guitarist Peter Banks, drummer Bill Bruford and keyboard player Tony Kaye, Yes were born, and took the world by storm.

Um. Not quite. It would take two albums and a lot of touring before Yes began making their name in the nascent progressive rock scene, even as later godfathers of prog Genesis and ELP were both finding their feet, and Andy Latimer was looking for somewhere to water his Camel. It's fair to say that the first two albums from Yes were not exactly going to shift the units, but there are indications on them of the band they would come to be. So let's have a listen.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/Yes_-_Yes.jpg)
Album title: Yes
Year: 1969
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals, some percussion), Chris Squire (bass), Tony Kaye (Organ, piano), Bill Bruford (Drums, vibraphone), Peter Banks (Guitars)
Track by track:

"Beyond and Before"
Right off this sounds more like a psychedelic rock/hippy shit song with a heavy guitar and some close-harmony vocals, the latter of which would become the trademark of the band. Anderson's voice is not as strong or confident here as it would grow to be, of course, but it's relatively strong even so. Definitely too guitar-driven for me, though the lyric is pure what would become prog rock, with a lot of pastoral stuff about nature, lines like "Sparkling trees of silver foam/Cast shadows soft in winter home/Swaying branches breaking wind, sorry sound/ Lonely forest trembling ground" showing the sort of thing we could expect from this band, lyric wise, though as Jon Anderson would take over most of the songwriting duties and this is not one of his, being written by Chris Squire and Clive Bailey, one of the previous members of Mabel Greer's Toyshop (was it an MGT song, or one meant for them? Don't know) we have yet to hear what Anderson will contribute in terms of songwriting to this album.



"I See You"
While you can understand that a band only getting together and then releasing their debut album a few months later would be necessarily short of material, I don't like the inclusion of cover versions, and here we have one of The Byrds' songs, which for me roots Yes even more in the sixties, even as they're approaching the seventies, and perhaps shows a slight lack of confidence in themselves that they had to have a cover on there. I don't have a lot to say about it, as there's really no point. It's a cover. That's it. I guess it's a vehicle for Banks to show off on the guitar, but not much more than that.


"Yesterday and Today"
The first song on the album written by Anderson, and indeed the first one written solo by any member of the band, though I read "Sweetness" was the first collaboration between he and Squire. It's much shorter, in fact the shortest on the album at just under three minutes, a nice little acoustic sort of ballad with guitar and piano, with Bruford playing the vibraphone, adding a nice touch. To be perfectly  honest, it's nothing special and yet it stands out as far better than the first two tracks, at least for me. Maybe it's because Anderson gets to exercise his pipes without the others joining in - no harmony vocals here; this is a one-man job other than the chorus where the harmonies come in.

Let's be honest though: the lyric is pretty poor - "Standing in the sea/Sing songs for me/Smiling happily" - oh dear. Still, our Jon will of course do much better, and anyway this is his first attempt at songwriting. Well, maybe not, but his first on the album.


"Looking Around"
Kicks the tempo back up with a big blast of bubbly organ from Kaye, the second song in which Anderson has a hand, this time co-writing with Squire. The keyboard riff does sound a little similar to Genesis's "Can-Utility and the Coastliners" outro, making me wonder if Tony Banks was listening to this album before recording Foxtrot three years later? There are also elements of "Watcher of the Skies" in the Hammond riff halfway through.

Again, the lyric leaves a lot to be desired: "Songs that I can't hear/Would take me for a while my smile/ Fares that are too dear/I'd rather walk out another mile." Right.


"Harold Land"
The first to get three songwriting contributions, as Bruford joins Squire and Anderson. This is the first one where we hear the trademark bouncing keyboard arpeggios that would characterise much of Yes's music, and it's also the first where they tackle a serious subject, that of men going to war and what it does to them. Was this a response to the Vietnam war? I don't know; it's written more as a World War I sort of thing, leading men in charges and such, but they may have been slightly jumping on the bandwagon of protest songs that were emerging at this time. I suppose in that sense it's the first song on the album you could call dark or even serious.

It's also the first that has what I could call a proper lyric, with the airy-fairy nature/love stuff pushed aside for the band to perhaps make a serious statement and show what they were about. Or not. Anyway it's a heavier track with a kind of sense of sophomore Supertramp about it, quite organ-driven with some nice vocal harmonies. I like the lines written about Harold after he comes back from the war: "Stood sadly on the stage/Clutching red ribbons from a badge/But he didn't look his age." A really good organ solo in the outro that would surface two decades later on the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe album in the closing arpeggio to "Brother of Mine".


"Every Little Thing"
Sadly, a second cover version, and by a rather obvious band to cover in 1969, the Beatles. I don't know the song, but that kind of doesn't matter, because where there are cover versions I'm just going to gloss over them. Musicianship is undeniable and I suppose how you cover a song is important in one way, but not to my appreciation of Yes, or the lack of it.


"Sweetness"
The first song written by Anderson and Squire, and in terms of track listing, the fourth song on which Anderson has a writing credit. Lovely keyboard intro, reminiscent of Procol Harum, with some reflective guitar and sighing harmonies. Lovely. Another ballad, but I would say better than "Yesterday and Today", and was in fact the first single released from the album; not surprising to see why. Very relaxing. Kind of nods a little towards The Byrds again, though it's an original. It's a pretty simple little love song, but if you think there's something wrong with that, talk to Paul McCartney. He has his own views on silly love songs.


"Survival"
Anderson keeps his fingerprints all over the album as he writes the closer, and it's heavily drenched in Kaye's trumpeting keyboard arpeggios, which fade out then to be replaced by Banks' beautiful, laid-back acoustic guitars then it and the returning organ complement Anderson's voice really well in what appears to be another ballad. Again the lyric is pretty laughable - "Mother flew too late/And life within the egg was left to fate" - do what, mate? But you can forgive that due to the dreamy nature of the music and Anderson's angelic voice. In this mode, he could sing your shopping list and you'd be entranced.
 

Bonus Tracks[/u]
(Only on 2003 remaster)

"Everydays"
A Stephen Stills song. Good organ opening, sort of a sense of drama about it but you know, it's a cover.


"Dear Father"
The only one of the bonus tracks which is an original song, written by Anderson and Squire, and forming their third collaboration on the album, it kicks off with a big punchy keyboard run then slips down into an almost VDGG style with the organ low in the background and the vocal quite low-key too until the chorus when it bursts up into life. Another heavy song, I wouldn't be mad about it to be honest.

"Something's Coming"
Seems to me completely pointless to do a cover version of a song from West Side Story, but then Waits covered "Somewhere" on Blue Valentines, so what do I know? Nothing to say about it though.
 

Note: on the 2003 remaster there are several versions of each of these songs, but I'm only taking one, because, you know, why bother? Two of them are covers anyway.


Comments: As a first album this isn't bad, but it's by no means a juggernaut that was destined to set Yes at the top of the prog tree. Truth to tell, prog was only really getting going around now, and it would still take the band a while to get established, both as an actual accepted rock band and as a later titan of the scene. For me, this album is massively, massively flawed. It has, for a start, too many covers. Two on an eight-track album is too many. There really shouldn't even be one. Who can judge you properly if they're not listening to your own music? Secondly, the lyrics really need work. I mean, I'm a (sort of) writer but no lyricist, so who am I to say, but some of the rhymes, the imagery, the expressions just make me cover my mouth and snigger. Of course, as time went on the lyrics became much better, much deeper, much more well-written, but here I feel they are barely acceptable.

There's very little to single this out or identify it as a prog rock album - even Wiki calls it "proto-prog", and I would probably agree with that. Yes may have been laying down some of the foundations of what would become progressive rock, but they don't contribute very much to the movement here. I'd even venture to say, much as I dislike them even more, ELP had more to add to the scene on their debut, released the following year. There are half-formed ideas here, but to me this band doesn't at this point know what they want to be, or where they're going. There's no real direction on this album and it comes across as a mixture of styles, influences and themes. Not something which would be said about Yes after they found their metier of course, but here I think it's fair to accuse them of being somewhat confused.

Not a terrible debut, but other bands have done better even at this point in time. Genesis's debut was pretty poor in terms of being a progressive rock record, but was better, I feel, than this, and I don't even like From Genesis to Revelation, and Supertramp's self-titled debut, released the following year, is a far superior album. And of course, in the same year as this makes its debut you have the stone-cold classic from King Crimson, which does more for the emergent progressive rock genre with In the Court of the Crimson King's opening lines than Yes do in the whole of this album.
Rating: 3/10
Yes or No? Definite No.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlEX8Iye46o

So only their second album and Yes are already courting controversy. They say no press is bad, so the "scandal" over their intention to use the original album cover, showing a naked woman and upsetting the delicate flowers over in the USA, would have at least been good publicity for them. The spat with Peter Banks over the usage of the orchestra, on the other hand, would not. When Jon Anderson decided the guitar and bass parts weren't enough for the sound he wanted to create, and instead brought in a small orchestra composed of music students (probably got them cheap, maybe even free) Banks walked. He realised his guitar parts would be at best subsumed under the orchestral sounds, at worst not needed at all. Wasn't it Peter Gabriel who would describe his orchestral work, Scratch My Back (or was it New Blood? One of them anyway) forty years later as "freedom from the tyranny of the guitar"?

So Banks knew, without having to be told, that he would not feature really on this album, and though he played on it he left midway through the tour, which led the band to recruit Steve Howe, who would end up being an integral part of Yes until the 1980s, when he would leave to set up the supergroup Asia, and then return to Yes on staggered occasions over the next three decades. Give his guitar work on the following albums, you would probably say the band got the better deal when Banks left, but even so, it sort of comes across as a hissy fit, as it wasn't as if they were going full orchestra for the rest of their career. Yes did use an orchestra again, but only once, and it would be another forty years before this would happen. So Banks could have sulked, played, toured and then been part of what was quickly going to become a legendary and wildly successful band. Instead, he took his ball and went home. Ah well. What might have been, eh, Peter? The things we do in anger, and have all our lives to regret.

But bollocks to him. Let's check out the second Yes album, the last one on which he worked and the one on which Yes did something which I don't think anyone had done before in the emerging progressive rock arena, and which gave them their first chart placing.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f3/Yes_-_Time_and_a_Word_-_UK_front_cover.jpg)
Album title: Time and a Word
Year: 1970
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals, some percussion), Chris Squire (bass), Tony Kaye (Organ, piano), Bill Bruford (Drums, vibraphone), Peter Banks (Guitars)

Track by track:
"No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed"

At least it kicks off with a big meaty Hammond run, but then for reasons I've never been able to divine they put in the riff from Jerome Moross's superb western The Big Country. It's a cover, too. I mean, come on! I know I went on about covers on the other album, and I still don't like the idea, especially when a band is trying to get themselves established. Well I guess I can't blame Yes for the composition of this song, but damn does it annoy me. That theme is one of my favourites - used to have it as a ringtone - and to hear it used in such a pointless way pisses me off. Anyway other than that the song is pretty decent organ-led rockout material, and certainly closer to what would become prog rock than nearly anything off the first album. And what in the name of blue jumping fuck does the title mean, eh?


"Then"

The first of three written solo by Anderson (the other two co-written with David Foster - that one? No, don't think so) it's a decent kind of psychedelic tune with some fine noodling on the organ by Kaye, and I do have to be honest here, I don't hear any orchestra. I mean, they were on the first track, sure, but I don't hear them here. Don't, to be fair, hear a lot of Banks' guitar either; mostly it's very much organ-driven with Kaye front and centre, especially for the extended instrumental parts. Okay I heard a little brass there, but it's hardly an orchestra now is it?

The reflective part in the last minute or so is nice, Squire gets to soothe us with a lovely hypnotic bass line and Anderson sings like a choir boy, everything else dropping away. Nice idea in the lyric: "Love is the only answer/Hate is the root of cancer."


"Everydays"

Okay well I can definitely hear the orchestra now, but this is a song we've already covered as part of the bonus tracks on the 2003 re-release of the debut, so other than the atmosphere the strings and such set up within the song, not much else to say really. Oh and I clearly hear Banks going wild on the guitar solo here, so what his problem was I don't know, but again, you know.


"Sweet Dreams"
And there he is, leading the line before Kaye comes thumping in with the organ. This is the first of the Anderson/Foster collaborations, and I must say it does sound good. I miss the close vocal harmonies though - there's one now, so not lost entirely. But scarcer than they were on the debut for sure. Once more, don't really hear any contribution by this orchestra as such. Certainly not taking over the track or anything. Have to wonder if Banks was just being a big girl about this whole situation, and if he was precipitous in leaving?


"The Prophet"
The Keyboard intro is really powerful here, and Banks gets to strut his stuff too. A long intro, about two and a half minutes, the theme of this song would be revisited in a slightly different manner by Genesis on their 1976 album Wind and Wuthering on the track "One for the Vine". The orchestra comes through clearly here, and it definitely adds something to the melody.
 

"Clear Days"
This I guess is the ballad, a simple love song that perhaps presages Anderson's later hit with Vangelis, "So Long Ago, So Clear". Or maybe not. Nice song though. A great opportunity for the orchestra to shine.


"Astral Traveller"
This is all right but there's just something about it that I can't put my finger on. Oh yeah: I'm bored with it. The keyboard solo in the midsection is pretty fine, but the rest of it can take a flying leap. It's also too long.


"Time and a Word"
Nice little acoustic guitar intro with some bubbly organ and the harder percussion from Bruford works very well here. See I can follow the melody here, whereas on "Astral Traveller" I was, perhaps appropriately, lost. This is pretty catchy, and a good closer too.



Bonus Tracks[/u]

Nothing that hasn't been already reviewed, or else special mixes of songs already here. Meh. Not doing those.

Comments: I think I very much prefer this album to the previous one. It seems more together, the songwriting is better, and despite the annoying covers, it works better. I really don't get all the fuss about using the orchestra; I mean, you can certainly hear it throughout most - but not all - of the album, but I don't think Banks had anything much to worry about. It doesn't overshadow or drown out or make superfluous the guitar parts. If anything, they're almost more pronounced here than they were on the debut. I can also see how this album managed to make it into the charts (just) and could be seen as more of a marker along the path to their career than the first one could. The first real glimmers of brilliance here I think.

Rating: 7/10
Yes or No? Yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYiWlnXppb0

The slow, trudging return of Trollheart continues...
Nobody seemed much interested in this the last time I posted, so here's your chance to ignore it all over again as we continue with the many and varied reasons why I just don't "get" this band.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/The_Yes_Album.png)
Album title: The Yes Album
Year: 1971
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals, some percussion), Chris Squire (bass, vocals), Tony Kaye (Organ, piano, Moog), Bill Bruford (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars, Vachalia, Vocals)



Comments:

The album that, in another dimension or reality, was never made, as Yes could very well have ended a few months earlier. Their van was involved in a head-on collision at Basingstoke in November 1970, resulting in all of the band ending up in hospital and Tony Kaye with his leg in plaster. Could have been the end, but in fact became the beginning: Yes's third album broke the chart wide open for them, punching all the way to number four, and even scorching the Billboard Hot 100 across the water, where it scored a very respectable number 40 spot. After this, of course, the phenomenon would be unstoppable.

The first time, for me, that Yes begin to sound like a progressive rock band, and you can definitely see the legend beginning to peek out here from among all the more or less standard rock and covers that populated the first two albums. There's a sense of something great being born here, and while I question titling two albums so similarly, I can see the point in one way, that this is really the first REAL Yes album, and therefore it deserves its title. Not just A Yes album, not ANOTHER Yes album, not the third Yes album, but THE Yes album. From here, everything changes, not just for Yes, but for the entire genre of progressive rock. The first side is pure class, although nobody likes to get the Clap. Sorry, song is called "Clap" isn't it? "Crap"? No that's unfair. I think it's a pointless bit of noodling though. Sandwiched in between "Yours is No Disgrace" and "Starship Trooper" it sounds, to me, an embarrassment.

Order is soon restored though in Yes's first suite, the three-part "Starship Trooper", which interestingly runs for just about its entire length without any big keyboard solo, restraint on the part of Tony Kaye, or was it just that there was no place for arpeggios and glissandos when the other three wrote it? He's there, for sure, but mostly with a sort of organ backing. Wonder if he felt left out? Future classics continue with the acapella intro to "I've Seen All Good People", another suite, this time in two parts, a joint Anderson/Squire venture, again with each writing one part. The opening part, "Your Move", sort of reminds me of the opening of "Brother of Mine" on the Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe album ten years later. Not too surprisingly, it's a vocalfest for Anderson and the first part is slow and measured, with kind of minimal instrumentation for much of it, before Kaye's organ comes blasting in, and there are some flutes in there too I think.

"All Good People" then kicks out the stays in a sort of boppy uptempo rocker with plenty of guitar, again I'd have to say poor old Tony is being brushed aside a little here; definitely the Chris Squire and Steve Howe show. In fact this theory is supported, that not taking part in most of the writing there is no real role for his keys; not that they're not there, but they're not upfront and there are no keyboard solos, the only one being on the opener on which, you guessed it, he has a writing credit. Anderson writes "A Venture" solo, the only track on the album where he writes the whole thing, but it's short and to be perfectly honest a little throwaway for my money. Reminds me more of some sixties band like the Kinks or someone, maybe very early Floyd or even CSNY. Meh. At least Kaye gets to break out his pianner and does a fine job, otherwise I could live without this.

We end then on another epic, nearly nine minutes of "Perpetual Change", again quite guitar-centric with a big solo from Howe at the start, and once again we're looking at the vocalist and the bassman as co-songwriters, so Tony can just stay there in the background I imagine. After the initial blast of guitar it settles down to a soft, pastoral-ish almost ballad, more guitar which then morphs into another heavy solo as Howe certainly makes no bones about showing the fans he is the man - Banks is gone, forget him: there's a new sheriff in town. And he takes no prisoners. Okay well I was wrong: Kaye definitely finally gets given his head here as he blasts out a superb solo in the sixth minute, Howe still trying to edge in over him.

Rating: 8 /10
Yes or No? Yes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y6oPS4aLk8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y6oPS4aLk8)

Okay then, next one is the big one! Word to the wise: soaking the rags in kerosene helps the torches keep burning longer. Nothing worse than being the one person in the angry crowd whose damned torch flickers out!  See ya then!

The Yes album is my second favorite... well, Yes album. I love every minute of the thing. And you better believe if I'm at Guitar Center testing a keyboard and I happen upon a distorted organ patch the first thing I'm playing is the riff from Yours Is No Disgrace.

I feel we may be falling out over the next one. Or at least, let's say our friendship may be, um, close to the edge...?
:shycouch:

Quote from: Trollheart on Oct 05, 2023, 04:17 PMI feel we may be falling out over the next one. Or at least, let's say our friendship may be, um, close to the edge...?
:shycouch:

I think it'll be fine. And you and I have had our disagreements in the past and our friendship is still intact. So don't sweat it!

Oh, it's funny when you make the same mistake twice in six months!  :laughing:
So, once again...
Well I'll be buggered! I thought it was next, but it isn't! This is.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c0/Fragile_%28Yes_album%29_cover_art.jpg)
Album title: Fragile
Year: 1971
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Rick Wakeman (Grand piano, Hammond, Mellotron, Minimoog), Bill Bruford (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars)


Comments: Ha ha! I'm gonna live! Live, I tells ya! I'm gonna live another day. Another pointless, empty, useless... well, I'm gonna live. I thought Close to the Edge was next, and have already set my affairs in order, but it seems I have a reprieve. Not sure how I made that mistake, but then, as I'd be the first to admit, I'm no expert on this band. This, then, was their fourth album and their first to feature long-time member Rick Wakeman, who replaced Tony Kaye after the keysman did a Peter Banks, but with electronic keyboards instead of orchestras, shaking his head and wondering what was wrong with an organ or a good old piano as he departed, the rest of the band waving goodbye and shouting "See ya in the charts, grandad" possibly.

Again Steve Howe is stamping his identity on the album from the off, but it's not long before Wakeman is elbowing him to one side and saying "That wuss Kaye wouldn't play electronic keyboards? They're the future, man!" and showing just what he can do, which immediately, to my mind anyway, gives this album a more keys-centric presence than any of the previous two. "Roundabout" is more prog too, a nice uptempo song with plenty of arpeggios and a catchy beat, which ended up making it one of Yes's best-known songs. The guitar riff here would later be used by Howe on the debut Asia album, in the song "Time and Time Again", and I hear less vocal harmonies here initially, though they do some in there around the midpoint. Shades of "Can-Utility and the Coastliners" here too.

Wakeman then has his first solo composition, a short instrumental which allows him to indulge his love of classical music, based as it is on a Brahms melody, though to be honest and fair it's not really that great is it? Sounds sort of like something you'd hear in a church at a wedding maybe. Comes across as really indulgent, but then, that would be one of the accusations levelled at Yes, and other prog bands, and the accusers would not be wrong. Another short one in an Anderson-solo-penned song, "We Have Heaven" which has a very annoying rapidly-repeating line in it and doesn't do anything for me at all I'm afraid, but at least it's short enough to be over before I have to say "Shut the fuck up Jon!" And we're into "Southside of the Sky", which seems to display that bugbear for me with this band: I just can't get my head interested in it and it seems to just ramble on and on without any real structure I can see. Oh wait: stopping now with a nice slow piano melody. That's something.

Some close-harmony singing now which does help to put more of a shape on the song, as the piano keeps the melody, though it's getting harder and more insistent now, but then the vocals fade out and it's just Wakeman and a sort of classical piano line, then wind effects and it's like a reprise of the opening minutes, which sort of bookends the track, for me, with two poor sections and allows it to finish badly. It's kind of Howe's somewhat histrionic playing that ruins it for me, just as I was beginning to like it. Would have been better leaving Wakeman in control. Then we get another pointless piece of showoffery from Squire on "Five Percent for Nothing", which to me is just nonsense, the next three all short and written respectively by Anderson, Squire and Howe solo, so you know what to expect. Anderson's is "Long Distance Runaround" and is a bouncy little ditty with a sort of staggered melody line, while the crazily-named "The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)" is of course a vehicle for Squire to wank all over his bass, and wanker supreme Steve Howe gets "Mood for a Day", unsurprisingly demonstrating his skill on the guitar.

We finally get to grips with a proper track on the longest, ten minutes plus of "Heart of the Sunrise", a big powerful instrumental intro which takes us into the third minute before Anderson's vocal comes in very low and quiet, and I guess for a ten-minute track it goes in pretty quickly, though again much of it passes me by. I always felt that Yes, to me, made more about creating instrumental sections without making any memorable melodies. Probably just me, but very little from this album has stuck with me, and I include your precious "Roundabout" in that. I simply could not sing one of the tracks here if my life depended on it. To me, this is more an album of people - undeniably talented musicians, but that doesn't excuse or justify it - showing how clever and talented they are, without too much regard for actual songs.

This album was the first whose cover was designed by Roger Dean, who would become as synonymous with Yes as Derek Riggs was with Iron Maiden or Mark Wilkinson with Marillion. He also designed the now iconic and still used logo for the band.


Rating: 4/10
Yes or No? No

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hE7HZCVVRU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hE7HZCVVRU)

Honestly TH? I'm kinda with you in some ways on this one. I love Roundabout and Heart of the Sunrise, Long Distance Runaround is good but not essential, and the rest I could honestly take or leave.

Perhaps our friendship was not as fragile as you thought!

Quote from: Mrs. Waffles on Oct 06, 2023, 01:58 AMHonestly TH? I'm kinda with you in some ways on this one. I love Roundabout and Heart of the Sunrise, Long Distance Runaround is good but not essential, and the rest I could honestly take or leave.

Perhaps our friendship was not as fragile as you thought!

:laughing: Good one, Mrs. Waffles!

For me, this album starts and ends with two of my favourite Yes tracks: Roundabout, with its intricate, short lead-in (which takes us seamlessly from gentle acoustic guitar to full-on rocking band in about one minute), to Heart Of The Sunrise with Jon Anderson's impassioned but inexplicable vocal climax. The album sags a little in the middle, as we might expect with the individual artist showcases, but they're all good efforts imo. Mood For A Day has a sweet, but not very obvious melody, and anyone who finds We Have Heaven annoying (*ahem, Trollheart*), just needs to put on some headphones and play it louder - then you'll wish it lasted longer and didn't stop abruptly with that slamming door gimmick. 
The low-point of the album is Rick Wakeman's solo track: in an album bursting with innovative ideas, he comes up with a trite exercise in mock-classical style that screams, "I'm auditioning with this fancy keyboard, but I've got no original ideas of my own." He clearly didn't get the memo explaining that prog rock is about looking forwards, not backwards, and so his track is not just a low-point, it is jarringly out-of-step with what his bandmates were creating.

Sorry Frownland (!) generally if I don't like an album (or it doesn't impress me, not quite the same thing) jamming on headphones isn't going to make any difference. My comments here should not be surprising to anyone really; I've made no secret of the fact that I can't get into 70s Yes, and yet I love their 80s output. Tres weird, because I don't think there's any other band that affects me in that way. But WHV just annoys me with that rapid-fire line. Not saying it's not a good song (quite honestly, as per usual with me and Yes LXX, I lost interest pretty quickly) just that it does nothing for me.

I've had a few small surprises along the way so far, but mostly it's been as I expected, and I'm waiting for the triumphant emergence of 90125, Big Generator and Union to soothe my nerves.

^ :) Of course, Trollheart! I hope it was 100% clear that I was only joking.

Of course. And now for the real stuff...
(https://www.acmearchivesdirect.com/cdn/shop/products/SG24_first_400x400.jpg?v=1564098618)

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/09/Yes-close.jpg)
Album title: Close to the Edge
Year: 1972
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Rick Wakeman (Organ, piano, Hammond, Mellotron, MiniMoog, Harpsichord), Bill Bruford (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars, Electric sitar, Steel guitar)


Note: Again in deference to its fans, I'm going to try to approach this album and write as if I had never heard it before. So I won't be saying "as happened the last time" and so on; although I have certainly heard it, I will attempt, as best I can, to forget all that and really try to come at it fresh. I doubt it will make any difference but hey, I'll give it a go. Can't say fairer than that.

Comments: It might seem odd, as a prog head, for me to say this but one of the fundamental reasons I find it hard to get into this album is the paucity of tracks, and the length of them. We're talking three in all, and while I like my prog epics, for me, not enough happens in the longer tracks to make them worthy of being that length. Not only that: they're both cut up into four sections, but not measured, so there's no way, that I can see, to differentiate between the separate, as it were, movements, so I have to take each as a full and complete piece of music. The title track comes in slowly and in a sort of ambient way, then bursts into a flurry of guitar from Howe and some pretty powerful drumming from Bruford, shimmering keys from Wakeman as everyone gets in on the act, Anderson letting loose a bit of vocalise in the second minute, but other than that we're talking an instrumental introduction that runs for four, settling in on a nice guitar line before Anderson comes in with the vocal proper.

Much of the melody is then based on a Hammond line with some powerful bass and guitar, with something (guitar?) making a sound that reminds me of morse code. Yeah. Good vocal harmonies, as you might expect, but as per usual I'm just not interested. Anderson is singing "I get up, I get down", which is the title of the third part, so I don't know if we're there already or whether this just runs as some sort of continuing motif through the track; I would imagine the latter as we still have more than half the track to go. Some nice funky guitar from Howe, though I would say that at the moment, for a track that runs for eighteen minutes, I don't hear enough of Wakeman here. He's coming in now with a sort of organ sound, but I feel that up to now the track has been mostly driven on Steve Howe's guitar.

Slowing down now in the ninth minute, getting quite relaxed and ambient, surely going into another long instrumental passage, a sequence there which reminds me of Peter Gabriel's later "San Jacinto", at least the closing section, now Wakeman's keys are tapping back in and Anderson's voice is low and almost muffled as he returns to the song, again crooning about getting up and also getting down. There's a nice little melody about this piece, but as usual I know for a fact if anyone asked me to sing any part of this track even a minute after it's ended I would have to shrug. It just does not appeal to me or hold my attention at all. We're now in the twelfth minute, and it is nice to hear it all slide back to a nice restrained pace and the buildup to what I assume is another burst of guitar is nice, presaged by a heavy, sonorous church organ giving the piece a very dramatic, almost sepulchral feel.

I guess you could say Wakeman is perhaps making up for lost time, or at least lost contribution here as he starts to somewhat take over the track in its latter stages, and it's good to hear, but for me this epic does not flow in the same way as, say "Supper's Ready" or "Grendel" or even "This Green and Pleasant Land" does. It seems disjointed, disconnected, and again for me this is one of the problems I have with Yes: their music never seems to follow any real sort of pattern. I know DriveYourCar noted that they are more based on a jazz ethic than a rock one, and maybe that's a point, because - newsflash! - I don't like jazz. But I think it's more than that. No matter how I TRY to like this, to see the genius in it or the lasting effect on prog rock (well I guess I can see that) or the reason why people cream their pants over it, I just can't. It's not for the want of trying, but I do have to admit that at this time I've become tired of trying, and I'm pretty much done with those efforts.

So now we're at the end of the track and I feel no different. The second track is another epic, not quite as long - only ten minutes - also broken into four sections, also impossible for me to divide them up and know what's what. "And You and I" begins on a lovely acoustic guitar passage, which immediately grabs me more than the behemoth title track that has just finished. Anderson's vocal then is pleasant, and the harmonies are as always really well done. The powerful rush of keys is really effective, a slow, stately march that has almost orchestral tones about it, Howe adding some fine flourishes of his own. Again though, good as it is - perhaps even great - I find it hard to thread any sort of path through the tune and hook it all together. It's almost like a few disparate and separate pieces of music with little resemblance to one other, rather than parts of the same suite.

Now we have what appears to be a sort of semi-country beat on the guitar as the tempo picks up a little, and we're into the seventh minute. This turns into a march of sorts, the percussion slow and measured, guitar sounding a little discordant to me, Wakeman's keys all over this, and then in the last minutes it slows down in quite an atmospheric, dramatic manner, the vocal dropping out and I think it may go full instrumental to the end. No, we have a short vocal piece to end. Okay. So that's what, twenty-eight minutes of music and I'll be honest: I could not pick out one piece of the melody I could sing afterwards. Hey, maybe it's just me.

I've never had any time for "Siberian Khatru", and I don't see that changing. A lot of you cite this as your favourite track on the album, and that's cool. You do you. In my case, if there was one track (yeah, out of three) on the album I liked least, it would have to be this. Rockier than anything that has gone before, very much guitar-driven and with the close vocal harmonies, it should probably impress me, but it doesn't. Meh. What can do you? Nothing, that's what. And that's what I'm doing: nothing. Nothing more. I'll review it briefly for the History of Prog, because I have to, but I'm done with this now. I don't get it. I probably never will.

Now, everyone fuck off and leave me alone. This is my last word on this. I do NOT want to be shown the error of my ways. I do NOT want to be convinced of how great this album is. I do NOT want to be told I need to listen to it 100 times before I can "get" it.
I.
am
done.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Rating: 8/10 (I'll give it its due: it is a great and classic album) but
Yes or No? No

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNkWac-Nm0A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNkWac-Nm0A)

I think your review was perfectly fair, and this is an all time top ten album for me. I can even agree with you that this is not catchy or hummable stuff, I don't think it was written with the intent to be.

I think a big part of why I like Yes so much is because they aren't making totally concise or concrete musical statements, it's all very much like the soundtrack to a dream, which is why Roger Dean's art works so well with the band's sound IMO. And You and I is my favorite part of the album, it just floors me with its beauty. I used to practice two-hand parts on the big epic Mellotron/Moog part.

Anyway, I don't think your ways are in error at all. Music isn't a linear scale of quality, everyone has different stylistic things that tickle their fancy and others that leave them cold, even within specific genres. I don't "get" probably the majority of the all-time most acclaimed albums honestly. So absolutely don't sweat it.

I have the first two for completeness and they sound great, yet they're far from favourites.  I listen to several hundred albums spiralled (all track 1's, then all track 2's, etc.) in a monster playlist, and I generally hear them in that context.

The Yes Album and Fragile feel to me like they're both four powerhouse songs and filler elsewhere.  I changed the title of "Clap" in my tags to "A Clop" because Jon seems to say in a very stoned manner, "eh, zong cart a clop!" and I always found it funny. 

Close to the Edge is the one that seems to be perfect.  I know we haven't gotten to Tales yet but while it remains the absolute fave, I think it's a grand example of the unspoken edict that seems to exist among music fans that It's Not Music If It's Not An Album.  The formats available were a bit wrong.  If that album had been a double but they didn't feel the need to fill each side with 20 minutes of music it might have been a major coup. 

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e7/Tales_from_Topographic_Oceans_%28Yes_album%29.jpg)
Album title: Tales from Topographic Oceans
Year: 1974
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Rick Wakeman (Keyboards), Alan White (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars, electric sitar, lute (!))

Comments: Well this just looks perfect, doesn't it? After one epic track on the previous album, we have FOUR on this. And they're the only four tracks on it. Arty-farty spiritual mystic lyrics, no track less than twenty minutes, oh and it's a double album! Great. Even the title screams prog pretension to me, and shows how those who hated prog would certainly target this band later as one of the dinosaurs of rock music, and blame much of the perceived indulgence, arrogance and overblown complacency of prog on them. And not without cause, I feel. It's one thing to have four almost side-long tracks - well, they are side-long, aren't they: only four tracks and a double album, which back in 1974 meant two records, four sides - but to have the lyrics so, well, unconventional and abstract is, I think, as the man says, pushing it.

Apparently the entire thing is based on the writings of some swami or yogi or winne the pooh or something, which doesn't make it sound like it's going to be a) of any interest to me or b) understandable. Reminds me of that joke I once saw, where this guy climbs to the top of a mountain where there's a holy man sitting and he asks him "O Great One, tell me: what is the secret to eternal life?" The holy man thinks - probably in a holy way - for a moment before smiling benignly and replying "Refrain from dying." Says it all, really.

 I don't expect to have much but contempt for this, but we'll see. The reviews mention words like "inaccessible", "overblown", "indulgent" - some of which I've used above - so it doesn't look like it's going to be a happy one hour, twenty-one minutes and fourteen seconds for me! But it starts out okay, with the first track, the pretentiously-titled (maybe it's the name of the book, I don't know, but man is it prog rock seventies excess to the max!) "The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn)" a reasonably restrained piece, mostly driven on guitar but mainly the vocal from Jon Anderson. Sounds like some Mellotron here, though none is mentioned. Interesting to see the drummer is gone, not that I have to say it makes any difference to me, no offence to drummers but I just can't tell one from the other. Seems Bruford left in something of a huff?

You know, that one is not so bad. I mean, it wanders a bit but not so much as to really get on my tits, and it's a nice little melody with a sort of chanting vocal and some fine keyboard arpeggios at the end, so not the mess I had expected, not quite. I suppose though I would still have to say it's not anything I'd remember, or do remember, after the track is over. I don't hear any hooks, there's nothing there to grab my attention; just a pleasant piece of mostly faceless music. Track two is "The Remembering (High the Memory)" (um, what? Sounds like someone was indeed high) and has another good vocal harmony line with again Howe's guitar pretty much leading things. Slower at least at first, but of course this is twenty minutes long so I don't expect it to remain that way. There is certainly a sense of joy and innocence about this one, I can hear the organ coming in a little more here, a certain sense of the medieval in it at times. Gets a little spacey and atmospheric then, kind of a nascent Jarre or Tomita sound, some fine bass work from Squire too.

I begin to wonder if I can't pin down the dislike I have for seventies Yes to their lyrics. By and large, they're pretty esoteric and someone said Anderson chose the words for their sound rather than their meaning, which ends up giving little meaning to the lyrics, and if the music is wandering all over the place and I can't understand the lyric, what's left? I prefer a basic narrative lyric, something that either tells a story or at least something you can follow, which is probably why I'm more a Genesis/Rush guy than a Yes one. But even on their eighties stuff some of the lyrical material is a little hard to follow; nevertheless, I can sing it, or at best I can follow the thread of the melody through the music, which mostly here, and on previous albums, I can't. So maybe that's at the root of why I can't really get into this music. Or not. I don't know. But it certainly does not help.

The music on this one approaches the ambient at times, quite relaxing and stately, but again not really following any pattern, at least none I can keep up with. At the midpoint it speeds up on Howe's guitar, then slows back down again into some nice synthscapes which remind me of Genesis around this time, though perhaps Anderson's lyric from "Close to the Edge" fits the pattern best here: "I get up, I get down". You certainly do. I can't keep track of this at all and it doesn't seem to have any real sort of structure, something I've said before about Yes. The next track, the shortest at only (!) eighteen minutes and change, "The Ancients (Giants Under the Sun)" seems pretty avant-garde in its way - lot of effects, odd sounds, a squealing guitar underlining how Howe (sorry) will not be left off any of these tracks and will take over if he can. Settles down then into a nice ambient piece, but not for long: Howe's off battering at the guitar again, trying to force the melody into a harder groove, and you kind of almost get the impression of a battle going on between him and Wakeman, with the latter muttering "Fuck off and leave me to meander along here, willya Steve?" In fact, the keysman would depart after this album, unhappy with his contribution and how it turned out.

Yeah, there's some choir going on and Howe has burst out with the guitar, but it's all to me a case of style over substance, again, something I find with a lot of this early Yes material. I want something I'm going to remember, maybe something I'm going to be able to hum. Hell, I can sing passages from "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" and I know "Supper's Ready" backwards, I know a lot of "2112" and I can sing other prog epics fine, but don't ask me to even remember what the first track on this was like as we go through the third. There's some sort of battle emerging between Squire and Howe now, but I really don't care. It's, again, technical wankery to me with nothing really behind it. Yawn. Wake me up when it's over. Or before you go-go. Either is good.

I read that a listening session was set up to introduce the album in a record store, and by the time it was halfway through most of the audience had fucked off. Shows how hard it is to maintain the interest; there's just so little to grab onto. It is, again, very much a vehicle for the band members to show how great and talented and clever they are, but the problem is that it's almost more like someone tuning a guitar and showing how well they know it, then someone says play a song and they can't. Not saying Yes can't play of course, but the idea seems to be more that they do clever things with their instruments (including Anderson's voice - words for their sound rather than their meaning indeed!) rather than actually make music you can remember or even sing. Parts of it, yeah, but most of it just gets lost, for me, in a musical morass of ideas and themes and textures and moods, and it really does nothing for me. The acoustic-like vocal part at the end is nice, but they've already lost me at this stage.

And we're, thank Christ, on the final track. But we have another twenty minutes to go, as "Ritual (Nous Sommes de Soleil)" opens with some sort of chant and - oh look! Howe's guitar again! How surprising. Well to be fair there's a decent melody going through this and it is mostly thanks to Howe, with riffs that would surface later on the Asia albums, but the real question that has to be asked is why the fuck did this have to be so long? I mean, a twenty-minute track is not, and perhaps was not quite then even, that big a deal, almost expected by the time prog came of age. But FOUR twenty-minute tracks? All right, one was only eighteen, shut up. And no shorter tracks to break them up? Listen to almost an hour and a half of music all at once over four tracks? Bah. Wouldn't mind doing that if the music was worth listening to, but, while in some places Yes do get it more right than they get it wrong here, mostly it's the other way around, and if I had to pick one word to describe this album it would be indulgent. Another would be pointless.

Rating: 4/10
Yes or No? No, no, a thousand times no.

Thanks for transfering this thread to SCD Trollheart: I imagine it must've taken some time to do. :thumb:

Quote from: Trollheart on Apr 09, 2024, 01:57 AMYes or No? No, no, a thousand times no.

:laughing:

Do I detect a note of disappointment running through your review, TH? It's an excellent review, and has prompted me to do two things: (i) listen to parts of the album again after a long absence, and (ii) try to defend an album that I grew to like a lot.

I say "grew to like" because this was an album that (having spent the enormous sum of £4 or so) I had to work hard at to justify the expense of: quite a few baffled listenings, feeling very much as you describe in your review. But in the end the subtle joys on three of the four sides won me over. Today I'd count those 3 sides/tracks as among my fave Yes songs. I like that they have various rather wandering interludes, but the band comes back again and again to some great, up-tempo sections.

On track one (Yes, you're right "The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn)" is an embarrassingly pretentious title) there is the sing-along hook of "What happened to this song we once knew so well", which the band do not overplay; we hear it a few times, then forget it as furthur into this side we are swept up by the soaring synths during the "Getting over overhanging trees" part. But then about 10 mins later, they play just one more time the "what happened..?" line, which by now we recognise like an old friend.

Those are the things I like about this album: the control and care about the way the songs are constructed. Yes, they're long, and therefore a little demanding and the hooks are not in-your-face rockers, but musically there's plenty going on and each 20-min song has moments of unusual beauty imo.

I am more in agreement with you more about the lyrics, TH. Jon Anderson's approach of "words for the sound of them" is one thing, but on this album, it's like he only chose words from a Dictionary of Mystical Terms, and that really brings out the negatives of this album: the overblown, arrogant, pretentiousness that you mention. Syd Barratt was another writer whose lyrics make about as much sense as JA's , but Syd at least had fun with vernacular language, which of course would've deflated the high tone of JA's concept, but might've made the lyrics more accessible, or more rooted in common experience. Here's a bit a Syd for comparative purposes:-

QuoteHoney love you, honey little
Honey funny sunny morning
Love you more funny love in the skyline baby
Ice-cream 'scuse me
I seen you looking good the other evening

Good-time rocker woman we'll stray our pieces
Little creepy we shine so sleepy
So whoopee!
That's how you look

A final point: hats off to you, TH for listening to the album all the way though! I don't think I've ever managed more than one side at a time, then I take a break. If you ever feel like trying this album again, you might enjoy listening to it that way - I especially recommend giving "The Remembering: High The Memory" another go. I rate as the best side of all. In structure, it reminds me a bit of Ommadawn: you think it's slow, begin to dismiss it, then realise that your head is being blown off by all the powerful crescendos.

Couple of things: first, thanks so much for bothering to read and then comment on the thread. It's always great when someone takes an interest. Second: as for transferring the thread, well, I hope in time to transfer all my "significant" threads, including journals, but yes, it does take time (I have nightly nightmares about transferring my History of Prog Rock journal, which I will definitely have to at some point!) but I don't want them to just languish over at MB, where the tumbleweed now seem to hold sway. I've also moved the King Crimson one and my other prog-related ones, and will transfer others as I get the time: right now, as you might see if you check my Hall of Journals, I'm concentrating on moving and fully updating those, with the most recent being the WWII one, the Most Evil one and the American West one. Next up are Animation, Country Music, Classical Music and Comics I think. So a lot of work, even if I'm just transferring. NB: In case you think I just copy and paste, I don't: I read them through completely as I re-post each article, so it does take time.

Third, and more specifically, the album: well, I respect that you have good things to say about it, though it's telling that even for someone who likes it, you maintain you've only listened to it once or twice all the way through, and also that you agree it can be very wearing in places. Most reviewers appear to agree with me: as Yes albums go, this is probably the hardest to defend against those accusations later, mostly by the punk fraternity and sorority. It's massive. It's long-winded. It's hard, even impossible to understand. It's indulgent with a capital indulge. And it takes up nearly ninety minutes of your time that you'll never get back.

On my one and only listen to it, no, I heard nothing that made me think of changing my mind, and honestly, though at some point (if I get back to it) I will have to relisten to it for the History of Prog, I am not looking forward to it. Some of the Yes albums I've listened to and hated up to this I could pick out the odd track I liked. On this, nothing. To me, it's like. almost, going to see a three-hour Korean movie in black and white with no subtitles. In a Korean movie theatre. While suffering from a bad cold, and then being mugged outside the theatre. I doubt I'll ever listen to it again.

Actually, I take your point on Barrett's lyrics, which to be honest never bothered me that much. Short, snappy, humourous nonsense I can live with. Long, boring, indulgent and up itself nonsense I cannot.

But thanks for the comments, and I'll get back to this as soon as I have a chance. Good to know you're reading anyway. Can always rely on you!  :thumb:

^ No need to thank me, TH : we all owe you a debt of gratitude for the amount of reviewing etc you have done for us- which yes, means a mountain of material for you to consider shifting, I'm afraid. :(

Quote from: Trollheart on Apr 14, 2024, 07:11 PM... and more specifically, the album: well, I respect that you have good things to say about it, though it's telling that even for someone who likes it, you maintain you've only listened to it once or twice all the way through, and also that you agree it can be very wearing in places. Most reviewers appear to agree with me: as Yes albums go, this is probably the hardest to defend against those accusations later, mostly by the punk fraternity and sorority. It's massive. It's long-winded. It's hard, even impossible to understand. It's indulgent with a capital indulge. And it takes up nearly ninety minutes of your time that you'll never get back.

^ As to listening to Topographic Oceans all the way through, I've addressed that aspect of our discussion in a new thread
( https://scd.community/index.php?topic=779.msg26589#new ) and, stung by your comment about "Most reviewers agree...", I checked it out on the Progarchives website: TFTO gets a very worthy average rating of 4 out of 5 stars.

TBH, though, I am quite happy to drop the topic because every time you mention the album, your opinion of it drops even furthur down a chasm of dislike, and will finally land, I imagine, with a subdued thump on the sandy seafloor that we can see on the cover of the album itself: 

QuoteOn my one and only listen to it, no, I heard nothing that made me think of changing my mind, and honestly, though at some point (if I get back to it) I will have to relisten to it for the History of Prog, I am not looking forward to it. Some of the Yes albums I've listened to and hated up to this I could pick out the odd track I liked. On this, nothing. To me, it's like. almost, going to see a three-hour Korean movie in black and white with no subtitles. In a Korean movie theatre. While suffering from a bad cold, and then being mugged outside the theatre. I doubt I'll ever listen to it again.

^ :yikes:

QuoteActually, I take your point on Barrett's lyrics, which to be honest never bothered me that much. Short, snappy, humourous nonsense I can live with. Long, boring, indulgent and up itself nonsense I cannot.

^ Very well put, TH ! I feel the same, though I didn't realize it until you just spelled out the distinction for me. :thumb:

Yeah, I won't labour the point, but good ratings or not, when most of your exclusively-invited audience fecks off before your new album is done, the phrase "voting with your feet" comes to mind!  :D While there were positive reviews, I've done gone cherry-picked from them to suit me, and find comments such as "Wishy washy tales from the deep" and "Close to boredom" (Sounds); "Brilliant in patches, but often taking far too long to make its various points, and curiously lacking in warmth or personal expression". He thought "Ritual" brought the "first enjoyable moments" of the entire album, "where Alan's driving drums have something to grip on to and the lyrics of la la la speak volumes. But even this cannot last long and cohesion is lost once more to the gods of drab self-indulgence" (Chris Welch for Melody Maker, and he's a Yes biographer!); "a great disappointment" (NME) and Gordon Fletcher described the record as "psychedelic doodles" and thought it suffers from "over-elaboration" compared to more successful songs on Fragile and Close to the Edge. He complained about the album's length, Howe's guitar solos on "The Ancient", and the percussion section on "Ritual", but praised Wakeman for his "stellar performance" throughout and believed the keyboardist was the "most human of the group". (Rolling Stone).

Of course, there were other opinions, so I'm not saying everyone hated it, but in terms of commercial success, though it got to number 1 in the UK and 6 in the US, it never rose above the Gold status in either territories, a mere 100,000 units shifted in the UK and half a million in the States, as compared to Close to the Edge, which had poorer chart success but sold more units (over a million Stateside), Fragile, which outsold it by a factor of four in the US and three at home (though again performing more poorly chartwise in the UK) and even The Yes Album, which racked up a Platinum certification in the US, so doubling its sales there. Yes, I do love my statistics, don't I? I should maybe quit my job and become a fulltime... statistics... guy.  :)

I love Tales personally. I tend to think of it in a different way than I do most other Yes albums, more akin to more freeform or less structured forms of music than tighter, more definitively "song-based" styles. I don't always listen to it all at once, but when I'm in the mood it's very captivating.

But I also like a lot of mystical new age hippie mumbo jumbo, stuff way more in that realm than Tales is, so it's very much up my alley in that respect.

Yeah see that's where we differ. I can listen to some new age music and I do like ambient, but I always prefer something more structured; basically, something I can, if I like it, hum afterwards. I couldn't even try to hum any of TFTO!

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Relayer_front_cover.jpg)
Album title: Relayer
Year: 1974
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals, acoustic guitar, piccolo, percussion), Chris Squire (bass), Patrick Moraz (Hammond organ, pianos, MiniMoog, Mellotron), Alan White (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars, electric sitar, pedal steel)


Comments: I'm not surprised at all, but I am rather disappointed that again I'm presented with an album of three tracks. My track (hah!) record with Yes on this has not been good; any time I can handle early seventies Yes it's been on the somewhat shorter tracks, so I don't hold out a whole lot of hope for this. It's also unfortunate - though of course I knew this - that Wakeman is gone, replaced by Patrick Moraz, of whom I know nothing. I have a vague recollection of his being involved in some disco hit? Maybe that was someone else. Can't see anything about it, and now it says he was involved with the Moody Blues, so yeah, maybe I'm confusing him with someone else. Either way I'm sad to see Wakeman go, as for me, other than Anderson's distinctive vocal, his keys were what made Yes.

You have to love the cover though, which for me follows on a little from the previous behemoth. Reviews for the album seem to be mostly complimentary, whereas they had a lot of bad things to say about Tales from Topographic Oceans, so it will be interesting to see how this goes. It kicks off with the epic, and it is an epic: twenty-three minutes of "The Gates of Delirium", not even broken up into sections, so you can't call it a suite, but one long unbroken piece of music. Good thing or bad thing? Well I must say it sounds a little like the band tuning up as it opens, and it's really about two minutes before it settles down into anything cohesive, and when it does it is again on mostly Steve Howe's guitar and of course Anderson's vocals that it finds its shape. I can't say I notice much of the new guy's work yet, but there are still nearly twenty minutes to go.

Yeah. Twenty boring minutes. :( Again, the old problem. I really couldn't care about this and my attention is wandering, especially as I read about the album on Wiki. It's just not holding my interest, and now we're into a bouncing, uptempo section about halfway through, which I guess, from what I read, is the "charge" section of the piece, and there's of course some great musicianship in it, but I just can't make myself care. At least I can hear Moraz's keyboard parts now, but to be honest, for me, they're not a patch on Wakeman, who used to take over the melody when he was required to. It's kind of another long jam, as I find - probably incorrectly, but certainly to me - most of the longer Yes pieces are. Y is for Yawn.

Sixteen minutes in then and it's slowed down (aftermath of the battle?) on a humming keyboard line with some squeaky lines that could very well be on slide guitar or keys, I don't know, and I don't much care. Does remind me though of later Pink Floyd, especially on The Division Bell. Seems an age since we've heard Anderson sing, and it is. Now he comes in with the soft and soulful ending, which is nice, but there's no way this track would ever grow on me. I'm just too bored with and uninterested in it. Dare I retitle it "The Gates of Tedium"? Oh, you know I do.
I see my friends Pendragon robbed part of the closing melody, something I have accused them of doing with a few other well-known bands, including Floyd, Supertramp and Genesis. Not that you care about that.

So that's the big epic over, but Yes being Yes, the two remaining tracks can also be classed as epics, or perhaps mini-epics, over nine minutes each. To my delight (!) "Sound Chaser" turns out to be a jazz fusion jam that just sets my teeth on edge for nine minutes and twenty-five seconds, almost an abstract expression of musical ideas. You know, it's not that bad: Anderson sings like an angel as usual, and there's to me more cohesion to this at times than there was to the previous track, but it does tend to degenerate (sorry) into what sounds to my untrained ear musical chaos too often. I will give it this: it's holding my attention, which the other piece did not. I still wouldn't sing or hum it, or even remember it, but I'm not drifting away from it in boredom as I did with "The Gates of Delirium".

And that leaves us with one track, as "To Be Over" closes out the album with another nine-minuter, which has a nice relaxed feel to it, almost the calm after the storm if you will. A nice gentle instrumental intro on which I think I detect use of this electric sitar Howe is shown as playing, then the vocal is low-key and sedate. I read the song was written after experiencing a boat ride down the Serpentine River, and that certainly shows in the relaxed, almost drifting style of the music. There's one bonus track, which is "Soon", and I must say it's really nice, kind of reminds me a little of "Holy Lamb" off Big Generator. Isn't it though using parts of the closing melody from "The Gates of Delirium"?


Rating: 5/10
Yes or No? No

Quote from: Lexi Darling on Apr 16, 2024, 04:49 AMI love Tales personally. I tend to think of it in a different way than I do most other Yes albums, more akin to more freeform or less structured forms of music than tighter, more definitively "song-based" styles. I don't always listen to it all at once, but when I'm in the mood it's very captivating.

But I also like a lot of mystical new age hippie mumbo jumbo, stuff way more in that realm than Tales is, so it's very much up my alley in that respect.

^ :laughing: Perhaps you listen to TFTO the way I often do: put it on, go do something else, then get a nice surprise when the best bits force me to pay more attention to the music again.

Quote from: Trollheart on Apr 16, 2024, 06:37 PMYeah see that's where we differ. I can listen to some new age music and I do like ambient, but I always prefer something more structured; basically, something I can, if I like it, hum afterwards. I couldn't even try to hum any of TFTO!

^ Sorry to labour a point, but there are plenty of hummable bits in TFTO, but it takes a few plays to identify them.
__________________________________

At least I can agree completely with your review of Relayer, Trollheart. I really identified with your "...but I just can't make myself care". Despite all the energy, skill and complexity of Gates Of Delirium, that was exactly how I felt. I thought To Be Over was nice enough, but this album pretty much killed my interest in Yes, and caused me to abandon complex prog for something like 35 years. In that sense it was an important album for me: "never buy stuff like this again".

Quote from: Lisnaholic on Apr 17, 2024, 02:33 PM^ :laughing: Perhaps you listen to TFTO the way I often do: put it on, go do something else, then get a nice surprise when the best bits force me to pay more attention to the music again.

^ Sorry to labour a point, but there are plenty of hummable bits in TFTO, but it takes a few plays to identify them.
__________________________________

At least I can agree completely with your review of Relayer, Trollheart. I really identified with your "...but I just can't make myself care". Despite all the energy, skill and complexity of Gates Of Delirium, that was exactly how I felt. I thought To Be Over was nice enough, but this album pretty much killed my interest in Yes, and caused me to abandon complex prog for something like 35 years. In that sense it was an important album for me: "never buy stuff like this again".

Guess it relayed the wrong message, huh?  :laughing:  :laughing:

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/95/Yes_Going_for_the_One.jpg)
Album title: Going for the One
Year: 1977
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals, harp), Chris Squire (bass), Rick Wakeman (Organ, piano), Alan White (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars)
Track by track:
Note: I'm cancelling this "What I like/don't like about this" as it's getting boring. I keep saying the same things and while you're used to me droning on and probably block me out as white noise I ---------- so that's what I'm going to do now. Sorry? Weren't listening? White noise, was it? Hah. Tough. Maybe next time you'll pay more ------------ and it's your own fault. I can't help it if ----------- and is perhaps one of the most profound things I have ever written, I think you'll agree. Anyway, on we go.


Comments: Seems this may in fact be a slight turning point for me with Yes, not only for the return of Rick Wakeman but the idea of the songs being shorter and more accessible, and a distinct lack of suites. Plus there's one song on this I already know, and love, so I'm one-fifth of the way there. Mind you, I'm not naive enough to think that this is going to be the album that opens Yes up for me, but I hope it will be less of a struggle than the last three or four have been. I do mark the similarities between this and Rush's Hemispheres, both of which would no doubt have ended with a black bar across the bottom - literally - in order to be sold in record shops later. Ooh! Cheeky! Is that meant to be Anderson? Looks to me, always did, like the guy is staring up at some graphs or charts on a board.

Kicks off with the title track, and I must admit, the rock and roll guitar at the beginning took me by surprise; no gentle fade-in or ambient opening here. I almost feel like I'm back in the days of the first two or three albums, when Yes seemed to be searching for their sound and had not yet settled on the intricate multi-part compositions that characterised most of their later seventies albums. There's a sense of exuberant energy here though, particularly evident both in Howe's almost blues-like guitar work and Wakeman's sprightly piano. Anderson is in fine voice, and it's a fun song. Not something I've been saying about Yes, I have to admit. Good start.

I have to wonder about the title of "Turn of the Century": is it a little too reminiscent of Supertramp's 1974 album? Hmm. Possibility of not copying, but taking from, two other big groups in the prog scene at the time. What to make of that? This is a nice reflective, introspective little song, led by Howe's this time Spanish guitar I think with that sort of spiritual idea in the vocal, very restrained. Some really nice piano from Wakeman, though I do admit I have yet to see him really stamp his authority on this album, mark it as his triumphant return. But I'm impressed so far.

The only song into which Anderson has no input, "Parallels" is a Chris Squire solo effort. Ah and here comes Wakeman now with a sonorous throaty church organ. Nice one, Rick! This to me sounds really close to something off later 90125 or even the ABWH album. Class. Howe still holds court, of course, but the keyboard wizard is clearly back, and letting everyone know it. Then we get to the single, and of course the song I know. "Wondrous Stories" was a single, and quite a successful one too, a first real hit for them. It's easy to see why. Anderson's voice is the glue that holds the melody together here, and it's a lovely song that always gives me the idea of slowly drifting along on a river. Does the basic melody sound familiar though? Bowie? Lovely ethereal work from Rick Wakeman here. I guess this qualifies as a ballad, though I wouldn't really consider it one, as such.

But it wouldn't be Yes without at least one track that ran into double digits, would it, and indeed the closer, "Awaken", chops fifteen out of the overall running time, almost half of it in fact. Opens on a very upbeat and sprinkly piano run from Wakeman, utilising his love of classical music, and while I would hope this isn't a throwback to the overwrought style of the last few albums, even if it is, there's been enough of a real seachange here that I can allow them one indulgent track. There's some really fine guitar from Squire, and though as with most of Yes's epic pieces I find it hard to follow the idea, or even the melody, it's not as attention-losing as some of the other songs off previous albums.

The piece slows down in the midsection for a nice instrumental passage that for me gives something of a nod to western movies. The choral stuff is good too, using two different choirs that ties in well with the church organ. A nice sort of ambient, atmospheric ending with Anderson's voice floating in the air like a songbird, fading into the music.

Other than, as usual, unfinished or different versions of almost every song on the album, there are three bonus tracks, one, a nice little guitar-driven instrumental which somehow manages to rise above itself and become more than the sum of its parts, or something. Nice. Again, "Vevey Revisited" (huh?) mostly runs on Howe's guitar, though Wakeman backs it nicely with some lush deep organ and keys which really give him a chance to add to the overall melody and make it complete. And then we have one of my favourite songs of all time. Shut up, and put that damned crucifix away! No, no I'm not a vampire. Well...

You can slag off or even question the inclusion of an old Christian hymn on a supposedly modern, forward-looking, progressive rock album, and ask what the hell they were smoking when they decided to cover it, but I always love hearing "Amazing Grace". Perhaps an odd one to choose, given Anderson at least is more into spirituality than religion, but then, I love it and I'm a pagan, so what harm? Always stirring, always emotional, always impressive whether it's sung with a full choir or against a single acoustic guitar. This reminds me a little of Jimi doing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and it's mostly Howe again. I think they could have done a better job, especially with a church organ at their disposal, but however.


Afterword: (What? Weren't you listening when I said... ah. White noise again? I see. Well, I said I'm going to have this new bit after I've reviewed the album, commenting overall on what I thought of it.

And here it is.

Much has been made of Yes re-inventing themselves on this album, and I would agree. Gone, mostly, are the weird, esoteric lyrics, the long multi-part suites and the melodies that - in my opinion - went nowhere. As most prog bands would find as the seventies wound on towards the new decade, and even as their successors would discover in the decades ahead, though prog fans love their epics, the world at large does not, and if you want to make it as a band, particularly a prog rock one, you have to be able to write those shorter, snappier and more commercial tunes and get radio airplay. It's all very well writing a twenty-minutes masterpiece, but who's going to play it?

So here I think Yes realised that, targeted their audience and began to make their music more accessible. It immediately benefitted them with a number one album and a top ten single in the UK, which remains their highest-charting single there. The return of Wakeman helped, I believe, but for me it's the shorter and more relatable tracks that make this album different to its predecessors, and points the way towards what Yes would begin to evolve into.

Rating: 8.5/10
Yes or No? Yes

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/Tormato_%28Yes_album_-_cover_art%29.jpg)
Album title: Tormato
Year: 1978
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Rick Wakeman (Keyboards, piano), Alan White (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars)

Comments: I used to wonder in passing what the title meant - obviously a play on the word tomato - but I read that the album was originally to have been called Yes Tor - referring to one of the hills in Dartmoor, but that someone didn't like the artwork and threw a tomato at it, so we get a kind of not-quite-portmanteau but a slightly corrupted word for tomato mixed with tor, and so tormato. Right. Well, if they had kept the original title it might have been interesting to have had a retrospective collection called Yes Tor Days. No? As you will. On we go anyway. This is apparently the last album to feature Anderson on vocals before he  rejoined for 90125, so what that says about how I'll view the next album is anyone's guess. There is one song on this I sort of know, but other than that I've heard nothing from it. At least I note a marked absence of suites, which in the case of Yes, for me can only be good.

We kick off with "Future Times/Rejoice", which is a pretty uptempo kind of marching style, Howe as usual making sure he's front and centre, though Wakeman is giving as good as he gets. I wonder why Anderson left? Must research; he's certainly in fine vocal form here as usual. Ah right; nothing special. The usual "creative differences", and he and Rick took their football home with them.This quote from Wiki does confuse me though: "This way of working caused internal issues as Wakeman recalled: "No one was afraid to say, 'Well, Jon, I think you should sing this part.' Or 'Steve, that's a bad guitar part.' Tempers got frayed."[12] Howe agreed with the view, and believed such tensions affected the album's sound quality and tone as a result". should that not read "everyone was afraid"? Otherwise it doesn't make sense, or is that just me? Hmm. Bit of "Can-Utility and the Coastliners" there in the keyboard riff, Rick me old son!

So far, I'd say it's a far more accessible album than the likes of Relayer or even Close to the Edge (and don't even get me started - again - on Tales from Topographic Oceans!), nice bit of vocal harmony there near the end, and there's that riff again. A decent opener which gives me hope that what I experienced on Going for the One might continue here. "Don't Kill the Whale" is the song I know, though I must admit I've only heard it once or twice, and possibly not all the way through, but it is catchy, and for once a good vehicle for Howe's riffs, which really drive it. Of course, it's also an obvious single, and was, and did relatively well for them. Well, not that great actually: got into the top forty, but only barely.  See, this is the kind of melody I can follow, even consider humming along with; simpler, shorter, more straight forward and basic, while yet retaining all the Yes flourishes. I have to say, Wiki says Wakeman used synth sounds which mimic whale song, but I don't hear it.

"Madrigal" is, well, a madrigal, and very pleasant for what it is, but there's not a terrible amount you can do with an old English medieval melody, even if you're writing it new. I do like it though; sort of takes the tempo, such as it is, down a little, and while not really considering it a ballad, it is the slowest song on the album yet, some ideas there which would resurface on the later Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe album. Very short too, just over two minutes. "Release, Release" puts me in mind of one of those old suites by ELP for some reason, like something off Tarkus, but then becomes its own animal (sorry) and picks up nicely. It's certainly exuberant, but there's something missing there, for me. It's okay. The faux crowd applause and the god-damn drum solo knock it down another notch, and I'd say this is my least favourite so far.

Look, drum solos should only ever be produced live. There is no reason to have them on a studio album, at least I don't think so. Even Rush's YYZ bores the hell out of me. I refer you once again to the Bad News mockumentary: "He did a twenty-minute drum solo as his audition. Would have been longer, but I hate drum solos!" So do I, mate. Bloody pointless. I read too that that crowd bit was taken from a football match. Jesus. Next up is "Arriving UFO" which is again okay but I don't consider it anything particularly special. Some almost AOR-style keyboard arpeggios, which is interesting, but again Wakeman uses that ending riff used by Genesis to close out the first side of Foxtrot. Why, I ask? It's annoying, and unoriginal. Yeah I find this song too long for what it is, and that goes for the previous one too. They're not actually that long in Yes terms - about six minutes each - but they seem much longer.

Overall, the good feeling I was initially getting from this album is beginning to sour, and I wonder if it's likely to recover from what I see as the slump it's descended into with the last two tracks? I would have to be cruel and say I would see UFO as standing for Uninterested; Fuck Off. From science fiction then it's on to fantasy/children's stories for "Circus of Heaven", with the music a sort of carnival-style backdrop to the lyric, which for once seems to be more upfront and important in this song, but it doesn't engage me, I'm sorry to say. Am I hearing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" here? Oh Christ no! Children's voices! Save me! Christ it's like listening to the Happy Little Elves or something! Get me out of here! Awful. Oh it's gone thank the Great Pixie. I'll be cleaning the sugar out of my teeth for weeks after that!

Thankfully, "Onward", which really slows everything down and brings things back onto some sort of an even keel, is far better, and more like something from the beginning of the album. Slowly marching along in a stately, grandiose way, it does its best to re-establish order and save the album before the end, and with its beautiful double vocal it almost manages it, a true ballad and it even sounds like it has some sort of orchestral arrangement, though I see no credit for such. Given that it's a Chris Squire solo penned effort, he has to be given credit for one of the better, even best song on the album. Divine. We close then with the almost eight-minute "On the Silent Wings of Freedom", which starts off as one of those things I hate the most, a jam, which has already run for two minutes without any vocal, and I do hope it's not going to turn out to be an instrumental. But it might. I mean, it's not bad but it again reminds me of Genesis, maybe "Firth of Fifth" or "Cinema Show" and oh there's Anderson now, so it's not instrumental. That's something. But still not really for me.

Be that as it may, we have no less than EIGHT bonus tracks (not including an instrumental of "Onward", which since I really liked it I may include, but will certainly listen to) thanks to the 2004 reissue. Might as well get on with it then. "Abilene" has a nice acoustic style to it, with wind noises and, for some reason, horses neighing. It has a sort of country twinge to it, and I already like it more than most of what's on the original album. "Money", on the other hand, far from being a cover of the Pink Floyd classic, is a kind of rock-and-roll rockabilly effort, pretty throwaway honestly, with some sort of speech track running behind it, a bit pointless as I have no idea what the voices are saying. It's alright I guess; still better than most of the album was. Definitely catchy and more accessible; keyboard puts me in mind of Dire Straits' "Walk of Life", kind of. Hell, it's a fun song, and it doesn't seem you get many of those on a Yes album.

There's a lovely bass and piano line leading "Picasso", again reminds me of that Beatles classic in certain ways and I think there must be a steel guitar in there, though oddly that does not make it sound country, but does add to the song somehow. Possible mandolin too? Howe plays so many stringed instruments it's often hard to tell. Quite nice again. And short, which can't be said of the next one, "Some Are Born", which runs for almost six minutes. Oh but I really like it. Just great; has a simple but very infectious melody line, and the lyric is also simple, showing that on occasion Yes don't need banks of keys and overdubs and choirs and esoteric lyrics to make a decent song. It does, to be fair, become fairly anthemic about halfway through, but this actually works in its favour, as it goes back to the simple style afterwards, and the two balance each other out very well. This song easily justifies its length.

I would have to say there's more than a little of the late Vangelis in "You Can Be Saved", also a look forward to their work on ABWH, especially "The Meeting". It's another slow song with a shimmering Wakeman synthscape pushing it along and lovely vocal harmonies. Interestingly, it's another one written by Squire on his own, and shows his talent for songwriting (though I assume that's just music is it? Yeah, I think Anderson does all the lyrics) while it's no surprise to find that "High" is a Howe effort, drowning in guitars, the vocal almost subsumed beneath the layers. Yeah, unless that's poor production then Steve is either intentionally or accidentally blocking Jon out so that you can hardly hear what he sings. It's okay but the first of the bonus tracks I'm not quite enthusing over, while "Days" is the shortest of them all, one minute long, an a capella and not surprisingly again to find that Jon wrote this one. I can't say it's that engaging, but as they say, it is what it is.

The last two have, to be fair, been pretty poor, so can "Countryside" recover things for us? Again, it leans quite heavily on Howe, but when it takes an upswing in the melody it does seem to become a different song, with a kind of samba or salsa or some sort of Latin beat anyway, very upbeat and catchy. Not bad. That leaves the longest of these tracks, almost seven minutes of "Everybody's Song" (Elton would not be impressed) which has a kind of climbing bass line running through it at the start, and something like movie music in the keys, like a suspense or horror movie maybe. Pretty odd I feel. Given how prominent the bass is, I would have put money on it being another of Squire's compositions, but no: the whole band were involved in writing it. Can't really say it does anything for me. And then we have the instrumental version of "Onward", which has a full orchestra (I think) on it, and was definitely worth listening to. I'm glad I did.


Afterword: Given the supposed low regard in which this album is said to be held by fans and critics, I'm perhaps surprised to see most of the reviews positive. While I wouldn't call this a terrible album, it's not the progression (sorry) I had hoped for from the previous, though at the same time it's not a case of backsliding towards the likes of Relayer et al. I of course know what happens after the next one, so whether this - and Drama - would be seen as stepping stones to those albums I don't know. I'm pretty sure I heard Drama once, and did not come away with a favourable impression of it. But we'll see. For now, this one did not impress me although it started well, and there were some good songs on it. Not quite a rotten Tormato (sorry) but I certainly wouldn't be frying it up with my egg and chips.

That comment has to be qualified though by clarifying that it refers to the original album, whereas I really have nothing bad to say about the 2004 reissue bonus tracks, which could have made another album on their own, and should, perhaps, have been included on the original, maybe even dropping one or two of the weaker tracks. Would have been a far different beast.

Rating: 5/10 (I would give it higher, based on the bonus tracks, but I have to judge the album on its original issue)
Yes or No? Maybe

I don't love Tormato like I do most of the 1971-1980 albums but I do like it. I think the opener is strong, the last two tracks are great, Madrigal is quite pretty, I used to not like Circus of Heaven but these days I find it a fun little singalong number.

It's my least favorite album from what I consider their golden age, and it's certainly nowhere close to CTTE or the Yes Album or Relayer but for me it's worth an occasional relisten.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/Yes_Drama.jpg)
Album title: Drama
Year: 1980
Personnel: Trevor Horn (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Geoff Downes (Keyboards), Alan White (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars)

Comments: Since I never stop going on about how I like 80s Yes but not 70s (jury has not yet been assembled for albums after that) I should by rights like this album, but as I said in the previous review, I don't think I did. I only recall hearing it once, and it obviously did not make the impression upon me that albums after it did. It's also the first album without Jon Anderson and the first without Rick Wakeman, though he is replaced by another of my keyboard gods, Asia's Geoff Downes, so it might not be that bad. I do note with a groan the shorter tracks have been joined by not-quite-epics but the opener is over ten minutes, and there's one approaching nine too. On the bright side, only six tracks in all.

With the rather unsettling title of "Machine Messiah" we're off into ten minutes of, to be fair, quite familiar melody, might be from ABWH (you know what I mean) and a slow, plodding, doomy tempo before it picks up on bright keyboard as we hear Downes for the first time. We also hear Trevor Horn for the first time, and I must say, it's pretty uncanny how like Jon Anderson he sounds; I think the first time I heard this I would have had no idea it wasn't him. Not such a wrench then, which is good. I do detect a change though in the music, which is also good, as it gets - how can I say this? Well, only one way really: more eighties than seventies Yes. There's more of a bite in the music already, a more, if not commercial aspect, then at least a more accessible feel to it.

Geoff isn't shy about getting stuck in, and while Steve Howe often tended to boss the songs in albums prior to this, at least that's how it seemed to me, the new guy gives as good as he gets, and shows he won't be any sort of a pushover. I'd still have advised against opening - even including - such an epic though; the fans were, surely, getting used to the shorter songs and now they have to deal not only with the departure of two mainstays of the band - some might say its heart - but the song lengths have doubled? Bit risky if you ask me. I guess this is almost a mini-suite in itself, given the changes in the song, but generally speaking it rocks along with the best of It Bites or early Pendragon, and despite its length it's not too much of an ordeal to listen to it. Not much at all really. Then, to contrast with the epic, "White Car" is a mere minute and change, sounds a bit like the soundtrack to a National Geographic documentary or something, though in fairness, for all its brevity, Horn gets a vocal in which is quite impressive, so much so that I almost wrote Anderson!

"Does it Really Happen?" seems to have decided to come out fighting from the off, strangely sounding more like progressive rock to me than almost any of Yes's previous efforts have done, perhaps even edging the barest inch into progressive metal territory. It's certainly got teeth, but do they take a bite out of me? I'd have to say not quite yet, and isn't the title very close to their later "It Can Happen"? Good bass work from Squire for sure, but I'd say Howe bosses this mostly. Impossible to know who writes what now, as they seem to have decided to credit all songs to the entire band, but I would think the guitarist had more than a hand in writing this. The a capella vocal harmony section definitely recalls Anderson at his best, and shows Horn can sing without accompaniment. The false ending, however, and the droning keyboard all points to later work Downes will pursue with Asia.

Another semi-epic then in the eight-and-a-half minute "Into the Lens", which would surface on Horn and Downes' Buggles album a year later. Sounds like cello and piano, though I guess the former could be made on the synth, and probably is. Can't say I like this; has very much more a Buggles feel than a Yes one. For what's in it, I wonder how they manage to stretch it to the lengths they do? Yeah I really don't like this. I might go so far as to say I hate it. In fact, I will. I hate it. Let's hope the last two are better. I think "Run Through the Light" might be; certainly starts off more hopefully and sounds much more Yes than Buggles. Some pretty heavy guitar from Howe and some nice piano from Downes - oh actually I see that's Chris Squire. Well. Decent song, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's managed to save the album. I know that ending keyboard riff though, just can't place it.

And that leaves us with "Tempus Fugit", which for me points the way towards later albums such as Big Generator and Union, and to some extent the ABWH album too. Actually, as it goes on, what I hear is very close to "I'm Running" off Big Generator. A harder, more almost commercial and definitely, in the main, more accessible sound here. Bonus tracks we have a few, beginning with "Have We Really Got to Go Through This", (a question I'm asking myself here) with a sharp guitar and then a real rocker as it flies along, an instrumental but I'd have to say nothing special, then "Song No. 4 (Satellite)" is the longest of these tracks at just over seven-and-a-half minutes, and I think it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that this could also be an instrumental. Yeah it is. It's okay I guess. Actually it's not: it's quite boring.  I'm not bothering with "Dance Through the Light" as it says it's just a slightly reworked version of "Run Through the Light", so that takes us to "Golden Age."

A happy, triumphant fanfare of keyboards opens this, and since Anderson and Wakeman were involved in the writing I honestly don't know if I'm listening to an old recording but it sounds more like Jon for sure. I can't say about the keys but I feel it might be Rick? I don't see the guys re-recording this just to put it on as a bonus track, so I'd say it was just added as it was recorded. You can hear the difference between it and the Horn/Downes material for sure. I wouldn't quite call it a nod back to their past, but it suddenly shows you how different, and yet quite similar, the two singers are. Still, there'll only ever be one Jon Anderson. Probably one of the better ones to be honest. End part reminds me of "Jericho" by Arena (who? Shut up) and it seems the other two tracks are also written (and presumably performed) by the "old" Yes.

"In the Tower" has a very Anderson feel, sonorous stately organ surely with Wakeman at the controls? It's probably appropriate that the organ sounds like a church one, as many hardened Yes fans were presumably in mourning for their heroes (what do you call a Yes fan anyway? Yes man/woman?) and with the final one, "Friend of a Friend" this is only further underlined, showing, to my untrained and uninformed mind anyway, how this album frequently falls down for the absence of this pair.



Afterword: I suppose, were I not so familiar with the albums that come after it, I would be more critical of Drama. The idea of returning to a small amount of tracks but increasing the length of those tracks seems to me to have been a backward step, but then I should remember that there are two epics on Big Generator, and let's not even consider the suites on ABWH. But overall, though this was clearly a step away from albums such as Relayer and Tormato, it would take another one before I would finally be able to start answering the question below not just in the affirmative, but with enthusiasm.

End note: It's interesting to see how poorly this sold. Only 60,000 copies in the UK compared to 100,000 for the previous album (plus a million in the US - says nothing about the sales for Drama Stateside, though it hit the number 18 slot so must have sold) and similar for Going for the One. Hey! How can that be? The aforementioned only got to number 16 in the UK yet sold more units that this one did? Surely chart placing are based on units sold? Yet this got to number 2 in the UK but only sold 60,000?
(https://i.redd.it/s4om2hs5zbc51.jpg)

Rating: 5/10
Yes or No? Yes. Barely.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/90125_album_cover.svg/440px-90125_album_cover.svg.png)
Album title: 90125
Year: 1983
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Tony Kaye (Keyboards), Alan White (Drums, percussion), Trevor Rabin (Guitars)

Comments: Finally! It's been a long and often very bumpy ride, but at last we're on level road and I am in my wheelhouse. All the horrors of seventies Yes I pledged to put myself through have been navigated, and (mixing metaphors) I've arrived in calmer, safer waters, and from now on it should be plain sailing. Anyone who knows me (and if you don't, check the rambling OP) will know I always profess to like 80s Yes but not 70s, which is why I began this project, in order to see if my vague dislike was justified, at least to myself. I think I can say with no great sense of doubt that yes, it is. Or has been. But now we're into the albums I know and love, and while everything after The Ladder will be new to me, there is a chance at least that some, if not all of the albums will follow the progression (sorry) that was begun here, and carried through at least four albums.

It's all change, and almost back to the future as Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes are out, gone back to form The Buggles, the latter then to join Steve Howe along with ELP's Carl Palmer in Asia (the supergroup, not the continent), while original keysman Tony Kaye returns and new boy Trevor Rabin steps into the shoes vacated by Howe. And, most importantly, Jon Anderson is back! This all apparently follows the first official breakup of Yes, who reformed as Cinema and then got back together again as Yes.

As a side-note though, I think we owe it to the former keyboard player to quickly run through his career after leaving Yes, and not returning with Anderson. It's a little shocking, and quite saddening too to learn that it looks like Rick Wakeman was on the cusp of basically forming Asia in 1980 with Palmer, Rabin and John Wetton (the last of whom would also join Asia, but with Palmer, Howe and Downes) but missed his chance due to, um, the label being ready to sign them without hearing a note. And he quit on "principles". Okay. After this he seems to have verged on being bankrupt and there are stories of him sleeping rough, having to record albums just to pay the rent (when he managed to have a home) and dealing with the death of his father. A tough time for sure, and though we know he's past it now and actually back with Yes, you have to feel for the guy. Some bad breaks, some very bad instincts, and he almost went down the pan.

But Rabin, I think the only non-English band member to date (he's South African), stamps his authority on this album right from the beginning, and they immediately hit the top with the opening cut, "Owner of a Lonely Heart", one of the very few Yes songs known by people outside of their fanbase. And when I say it hit the top, I mean where it matters: the USA (didn't do so well back home, but America lapped it up). Showing this "new" Yes much more airplay, commercial and indeed America-friendly, the album powered up the Billboard Charts to reach the dizzy heights of number 5 (I think their highest there ever) while, again, back in old Blighty, though 90125 fared better than Drama, you couldn't say it set the charts alight, peaking at number 16.

With the exception of the return of Kaye and Anderson, everything about this is new. Gone are the fantasy-themed Roger Dean covers, gone are the ponderous epic suites, gone the weird, often incomprehensible lyrics. Trevor Horn, although no longer behind the mic as the master has returned and demanded his crown, produces and his stamp is all over this album. It's fresh, it's new, it's immediate, it's popular. It's almost not Yes, and it would, I think, be safe and fair to say that it's almost the least prog rock Yes album. Not quite Abacab, but definitely leaning more into the pop spectrum than the old proggy world. And it paid dividends, breaking the US wide open for them.

Much of that success, it has to be said, is down to Rabin, who brought some of his unfinished demos to the new band, demos which turned out to be some of the best tracks on this album. One such is the opener, the aforementioned hit single "Owner of a Lonely Heart". Right away you're hit in the face by punching drums and blaring guitars that sound, well, angry. This will be no soft, slow fade-in or gentle acoustic opening. Reminds me of the movie Time Bandits, where the bad guy says wistfully "If I were God, there'd have been no messing around. Day one: BAM! Lasers!" And that's how it feels. It must have been a shock for fans of the old Yes. If Drama was a move away from their old style while still retaining some of it, this new album kicked it all overboard, struck out for new horizons and greeted a new day with a record I doubt any Yes fan had even expected to hear.

I'm not sure if Steve Howe would have approved, but it's almost a fusion of heavy metal and the Art of Noise as stabbing, orchestral hits are the order of the day, Anderson in fine voice and sounding happy to be back. What was missing, in my opinion from Yes up to now was a real hook, a catchy melody, but this album is stuffed with them, and none more so than "Owner of a Lonely Heart." There's really no point here where the album flags, dips or disappoints, and the band never put a foot wrong. It's next to a perfect Yes album. It has to be said that, Howe-like, Trevor Rabin does hold court over much of this, but then this is one of his own songs, so I guess you can understand that. We move then onto another of his, slower and more stately as "Hold On" again has a big bouncing drumroll and snarling guitar, then pitch-perfect vocal harmonies shared by Rabin and Anderson, meshing perfectly. And the hook is there in the simple chorus. Perhaps it took an outsider to come in and show them how, but it's hard to shake the feeling that this behemoth is all but entirely driven by Rabin, and it's like a breath of fresh air blowing through a musty house. Open those windows!

The a capella midsection is an exercise in timing, and there will be other examples, but mostly what these songs show is that Yes - or at least Rabin - have learned that what the world wants is short catchy songs they can sing, and there isn't one here (other than the single instrumental) that you can't sing, and that you won't remember. This is probably the first Yes album that has so many tracks that fade, as the first three do, as we power into "It Can Happen", with sitar and tanpura (I don't know; look it up. Oh all right. According to Wiki: "The tanpura does not play a melody, but rather creates a meditative ambience, supporting and sustaining the performance of another musician or vocalist, as well as for musicians accompanying a dance performance." Happy?) opening the song and giving it, obviously, a very eastern/Indian feel. The tag line "Look up, look down, look out, look around" could almost be a call to arms for the new Yes: watch out! They're not the same band.

Very anthemic and I would imagine this went down really well onstage, some great guitar solos from Rabin, and on into "Changes", the first track here to open on what could almost be styled the old Yes instrumental intro, with Kaye outdoing himself on the keys and the song almost rushes into an equally powerful echoing vocal performance by Anderson, the whole thing then exploding into life on an almost Police-like quasi-reggae rhythm, building in intensity until it ends as it began, Kaye's fingers flying all over the keys till the song comes to an abrupt and very satisfying stop.

The only instrumental then, its title nodding back to the name of the band Rabin, Squire and White put together on the demise of Yes, "Cinema" comes in almost as a fade, and I read it was originally written as a twenty-minute piece, so that's not so surprising. It really gives Rabin a chance to show off his fretboard skills, though it only lasts just over two minutes, and would, I guess, be the most "old" progressive rock track on the album, yet imbued with the new life that is pulsing through this album, and this band, as they rise from the ashes. They could easily have called this album Phoenix. Next we get a fantastic display in vocal harmonies a capella as "Leave it" powers out of the traps. It's interesting how the verses are all vocal with a sort of, for want of another term, Flying Pickets-style where rhythm is sung - ah, if you know the album you know what I mean, it's hard to describe otherwise. But the full band kicks in then for the chorus. Superb.

Things keep hammering along nicely with "Our Song", probably the fastest track on the album, which really never stops to give you a chance to catch your breath, honking arpeggios from Kaye while Rabin as ever fires off the riffs and Anderson works his magic, this one of only two on which he takes lead vocals solo. Again, you can point to the hooks and there's nothing here you couldn't sing along with. Things slow down with the dark and gritty "City of Love", Squire's menacing bass leading the song in, orchestral hits back in the mix, and again Anderson singing solo. I'd call this one of the hardest, darkest Yes songs I've ever heard, and yet it has that hook and you can imagine rapt audiences bellowing "We'll be waiting for the night/ We'll be waiting for the night to come!" Kind of gives me a sense of "Waiting for the Worms" in the last section, the advance of something building to an unstoppable climax.

If there's a ballad on the album (and there kind of isn't) then it comes in the shape of the closer, "Hearts", also the longest track, at seven-and-a-half minutes. It opens almost like something from their seventies repertoire, with a sort of oriental little keyboard line keeping the vocal of Anderson and Rabin company, then slowly building as it grows until it unleashes a stirring, emotional chorus, again very prog rock but retaining the new sound to create a perfect synthesis of classic and new Yes. I hear the ghost of ELO here, and quite a lot of Genesis circa this era too. Wonderful solo from Rabin just puts the cherry on a very tasty cake.

Apart from all the reissues and remixes of tracks already on the album then, just two real bonus tracks, one from the Cinema days, called "Make it Easy" has what I can now clearly identify as the Rabin factor, so different to all previous Yes material prior to this album, and being Cinema originally it of course has him on vocals, which is I think the first time we get to hear him sing without Anderson. I've heard his solo album, and I know he's a good singer but this is the first time anyone listening to the new Yes would be able to hear what he can do. This certainly would not have been out of place on 90125, with an almost Asia-style melody full of hooks and airplay potential, great keyboard work by Kaye really colours the melody. The other one is also an ex-Cinema song, and though I personally expected a slow love song,  "It's Over" is another rocker with some fine guitars driving it and a really pounding drumbeat, and a very familiar keyboard riff, though again I can't place it. Almost Queen-like vocal harmonies against a buzzing rippling keys line, though I would say Rabin's vocal is not as good here, a little strained perhaps.

Afterword: Although this album was a revelation for me, it wasn't the pleasant shock you might think, as although I'm certain I heard "Owner of a Lonely Heart", probably through MTV, I don't remember feeling I needed to check out the album, until my mate played Big Generator for me, and I was hooked. I think I was even reluctant to listen to it, knowing it was Yes, but boy was I wrong! He then gave me a recording of this album and I was on the way, though when I tried to check their back catalogue I was disappointed. This, however, and their next three or four albums showed me a side of Yes I had never dreamed existed. It's like a new band, with a new lease of life, a new purpose. Every track is excellent, I can all but sing the album (badly) and when I listen to it, there's not one track I skip, and that's my definition of a perfect ten. And so it must be - nay, cannot otherwise be scored.

Rating: 10/10
Yes or No? Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!

Im always trying to find more Yes that I like but right from the start they peaked with Beyond and Before to my ears. Incredibly rocking sound that they never got back to.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8d/BigGeneratorLP.jpeg)
Album title: Big Generator
Year: 1987
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Tony Kaye (Keyboards, piano), Alan White (Drums, percussion), Trevor Rabin (Guitars)

Comments: When has a prog rock group, who have been churning out albums for years or even decades, not had musical differences and difficulties? You can talk about Genesis and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, or Pink Floyd's slow taking over by Roger Waters on The Wall and The Final Cut, but to be fair, few prog bands featured such an almost revolving door policy as have Yes. RIck Wakeman would leave and rejoin the band five times, Jon Anderson three times - Steve Howe, Alan White, Chris Squire, Geoff Downes - everyone seems to have been all but a part-time member in ways, and the band looks not to have really had what you could call a stable lineup for very long, in terms of musical history.

With so many people coming, going, disagreeing, feuding and fighting, forming cliques and having different ideas about musical direction, it's not that surprising that Yes could certainly not be called a happy family, perhaps not even a dysfunctional one. The period following the 90125 tour was, though, apparently, one of the worst in the band's history. In 2023, Rabin admitted that completing Big Generator had "almost killed me. I had to salvage the whole thing and mix it on my own with no-one in the studio. It was traumatic. My stomach lining went, but I did finish the record." And he would not be the only one. Anderson fought with Squire, Kaye fought with producer Trevor Horn, who never worked with the band again, and to use an old hippy quote, there could not have been any good energy in any of the numerous studios they tried to record in.

The rather unexpected success of the previous album brought its own problems. Having been the first album on the Atco imprint of Atlantic Records for the band, a follow up was demanded, especially a hit single, and one thing any band - but especially one like Yes, used to 20-minute epic side-long suites and certainly unfamiliar with the records charts - dreads is the pressure to come up with a hit. It almost always backfires on the label (see Prince's early work as an example) and can stifle creativity. Hits, in my opinion, should not be written as such: if a song gets airplay and does well in the charts, if enough people want to buy it, that should be a happy by-product of the writing process, not the other way around. The fact that so many artists try - or are told to - write hit singles could, to me, go a long way towards explaining some of the total dross that ends up in the charts, even at number one. But that's another story.

As I noted in the overblown intro to the last album, this one was in fact the first full Yes album I had heard. Well, that's not quite true: I think I heard a cassette of Drama a year or so prior, but it made no impression on me. So at this point, my only flirtation with Yes was a vague remembrance of the single "Wondrous Stories" and Jon Anderson's work with Vangelis, specifically their chart singles "I Hear You Now" and "I'll Find My Way Home", and that was more through my interest in Vangelis than Anderson. But once I heard this I loved it, and reading about all the strife and unrest and disunity that attended it bemuses me, because it certainly doesn't sound like an album the band didn't have fun making. But then, these are professionals, and who can detect such strained relations in any of the other three albums I mentioned above?

Big Generator continues the move away from the longer prog rock songs Yes had been known for (perhaps why it appeals so much to me) while allowing a certain, shall we say, progressive rock sensibility to leak in to some of the longer songs. But primarily it's an album of, again, pop/rock songs and airworthy tracks, and it did, in the end, yield another hit single, though Yes would never again reach the rarefied heights of number one, either here or in the USA. They're just not made that way, and "Owner of a Lonely Heart" has to be seen as an aberration.

Also, remember that though the others had input into it, much of what went onto the album came from tracks and songs Trevor Rabin had already written or partially written, and with Jon Anderson's ideas for longer, more esoteric material ("I wanted to jump on a Stravisnky-ism", said Anderson) shut down by Horn, it's Rabin's music that we get to hear.

For me (although I heard them in reverse) it's pretty much 90125 Part II in the same way as the next one, Union, can be considered a continuation of or sequel to the single Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe album, though whether or not they moved away from that style afterwards I have yet to find out.

There's almost a false sense of security built here early for the classic Yes fan, as, unlike the previous album, this one fades in on swirling synth and with almost Beach Boys-style vocal harmonies, but then the drums kick in and the orchestral hits start piling on as "Rhythm of Love" opens the album, Rabin's guitar of course very much in evidence. It is, to be fair, almost what Atco wanted: could be "Owner of a Lonely Heart" rewritten, though it would not get them another number one, as I said: this in fact just scraped into the top 40 Stateside and did nothing over here, though it did get to number 2 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks Chart, whatever that is. It's another fine slice of radio-friendly almost AOR, with nice but not entirely dominant keys by Tony Kaye, and both Rabin and Anderson in fine voice.

Another set of vocal gymnastics, similar perhaps to the opening of "Leave It" kicks in the title track, and you can certainly hear where Horn has taken control on this, though Anderson's ghost is very detectable in the esoteric lyric. It's a much harder track, though, than almost anything on 90125, close enough to hard rock really, plenty of punchy guitar trading licks with orchestral hits and stabs, and some truly immaculate timing on a stop/start section in the song. It's not the best track on the album by any means, but again, like its predecessor, I don't believe there's a single bad track here. Some very phased or some damn thing guitar gives the midsection solo an almost otherworldly feel, and again I hear The Art of Noise nodding in appreciation.

Everything slows down then for the first of two ballads, slow, susurrating drums and soft synthscapes ushering in "Shoot High, Aim Low", with a haunting guitar motif from Rabin and slow, measured, almost funereal drumming from Andy White. Lovely Spanish guitar from Rabin adds another level to the melody, as does a very effective solo drum part - not a drum solo, as such, it's quite short - where White takes over the tune for a moment before bringing everyone else in with him. Incidentally, I was told by my mate this song was about Bonnie and Clyde, but can find nothing to support that, so either he made the assumption or he was just having me on. Still a fantastic track, and quite reminiscent (now that I can say it) of early Yes music.

Ramping everything back up then for "Almost Like Love", with brass and fast-paced drumming and a growling guitar riff that takes you by the throat, and organs that sound almost spiritual. Rabin says the song was semi-inspired by Phil Collins' switch to salsa and jazz on "Sussudio", but for me, this is a much better way to integrate that genre into your music. It's just a joyful piece, something you want to dance to, and the horns really make the song. The end section, where Anderson just goes wild on the lyric, is one of my favourite parts on the album. The "big hit single" is next, and while the band worked on most of the other songs, this is entirely Rabin's song, and in fact he had been writing it for Stevie Nicks. I could see it working for her. It opens with a violin and cello string introduction then a powerful chunky guitar riff cuts in, reminding me again of the number one  hit, but it's somewhat more moderately paced, and again you can see the idea of appealing more to the younger, female fans who may have liked "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and wanted more love songs. It's not a ballad, but it is a love song, and while Yes may have had these on previous albums, this seems to me (obviously, as it was meant to be) more an actual attempt at writing a hit single and a love song all in one. This one did better than "Rhythm of Love", getting to number 30, and topped that Mainstream chart. Again, the UK sniffed and said "Pooh! That's not Yes! Why, there's not even three parts to the song! The very idea!" etc.

I like the little harmonica bit in it too, seems to be just thrown in for fun, and then it's the first track on the album that ends without fading, smashing out on a big echoing guitar chord, and into one of two I guess you could say epics, as such. "Final Eyes" runs for just over six minutes and opens on a lovely acoustic guitar and typical Anderson vocal, pretty much solo until the second chorus, when the whole thing explodes into life, a lovely little softer midsection completing the song. I would say that the lyric is somewhat lacking, as they just seem to repeat the same verse each time, but then the music is so good it kind of doesn't matter. One of those songs I mentioned which nods very much back in the direction of the old Yes classic progressive rock themes.

Another fade and into "I'm Running", which actually is the longest track on the album, just shading the seven and a half minute mark, and opens with an almost Howesque guitar riff and this time nods forward, towards the likes of "Teakbois" on the ABWH album, some really nice marimbas or vibes or xylophone or something like that, shades of mid-80s Peter Gabriel here too I feel. Great buildup in the midsection, another fine stop/start part, and does someone blow a kazoo there? Either that, or a duck got into the studio. The ending keyboard riff is very familiar but I've never been able to place it - oh hold on! Years later he gets it! It's "Can-Utility and the Coastliners", isn't it? The closing riff on the last track on side one of Genesis's 1972 Foxtrot. Well, that didn't take long did it? Only 25 years or so to figure it out.
::)
Anderson gets his way in the end though, and I like to think, as his swan song, in a way, he metaphorically escaped from the room Horn had locked him in and scribbled down and slipped the lyrics to the other band members as "Holy Lamb (Song for Harmonic Convergence") has his airy-fairy new age fingerprints all over it, and is a gentle and relaxing and indeed triumphant way to close the album. Lovely acoustic piece with rising vocal harmonies, obviously, and a soft little fade out, the album tip-toeing its way out as it waves goodbye, as does Anderson, who would depart the band after this album.

No extra tracks, by the way, other than remixes and re-recordings of tracks already on the album, and I don't do those. As Jesus once said, fuck that shit.

Afterword: Look, I'm completely aware that this and the previous album divide Yes fans. Those who've been with them since the self-titled sneer and frown at it and call it not a Yes album, and those who had perhaps gotten a little bogged down in all the epics and mystical lyrics perhaps see it as a breath of fresh air. Some will say Big Generator presided over, or even caused, the split within the band; some will blame Horn, some Wakeman for leaving, others will just shrug and say they like it or don't. I haven't that much invested in Yes, so for me, this, 90125, ABWH and Union constitute, mostly, what I know (or knew) about Yes, and I liked them all.

Having listened to their seventies output, I still place these albums as my favourites of theirs, and you can talk about Close to the Edge till you're blue in the face, and it can win all the awards there are, but I still prefer the era these albums came out. I don't know how I'll feel after I progress beyond The Ladder, which is the last actual Yes album I heard, but I love this one, and I always will. So...

Rating: 10/10
Yes or No? Oh hell damn Yes![/i][/i]

Quote from: Weekender on Feb 21, 2025, 11:39 PMIm always trying to find more Yes that I like but right from the start they peaked with Beyond and Before to my ears. Incredibly rocking sound that they never got back to.

I'm no expert on them, but this was literally their first song, the first track on their first album, and you think they peaked then? Are you not a CTTE nut? The sound on the debut was vastly different to what they ended up playing, like a lot of prog bands (look at Genesis: began as a folk band mostly, or The Moody Blues, a straight-out blues band). Not sure if you'd appreciate the more electronic, poppy version of mid-1980s Yes, but it might be worth your giving it a try.

Following Anderson's departure he hooked up with fellow alumni Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman and Bill Bruford to form the short-lived and surely hardly rolling off the tongue Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe, who released one album in 1989. I'm not including that here for two reasons: one, it's not technically seen as a Yes album, as the remaining members of the band, though they did not release any new albums at that time, retained the name and copyright (hence the unwieldy name for the new ex-Yes group) and also I've reviewed it already. If you really want to read my thoughts on it they're  here (https://www.musicbanter.com/members-journal/56019-playlist-life-trollhearts-resurrected-journal-5.html#post1078304).

After writing material for what was to have been the second ABWH album, Anderson and his buddies got back together with the band, Yes now becoming for a short time an eight-piece, and consequently the second ABWH album became the thirteenth Yes album.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/Yes_-_Union.png)
Album title: Union
Year: 1991
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Rick Wakeman (Keyboards), Tony Kaye (Hammond Organ, Piano), Alan White (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars), Trevor Rabin (Guitars), Bill Bruford (Drums)

Comments: Considering the in-fighting that attended this album too (obviously hatchets were not buried, and old enmities still simmered) it's a little laughable that they chose the title they did. While this may have been a union of two bands - or rather, two halves of one band - it really was more of a merger; those who had left the band returned to it, brought their music and were subsumed back into the parent entity. But arguments over who would play what, whose music would be used and what direction the album should take raged on, even without the presence of Trevor Horn. And yet, again, this is not the sense you get from listening to the album. Rather, it's a feeling of a band who have been away from each other too long getting back together and really enjoying themselves. Just shows you, surface impressions can really fool you.

With Kaye's already-written-of contempt for synthesisers, Trevor Rabin had had to play most of the keys on the last two albums, but now Rick Wakeman was back, and he was happy to sit behind a bank of keyboards, leaving Rabin free to concentrate on his guitars. Even so, their producer, Jonathan Elias, seemed to think that the work was substandard and, as both Wakeman and Howe had solo engagements to honour during the recording of the album, he brought in session musicians to flesh the songs out, to both the original players' disgust. Well, you couldn't blame them, could you? Elias was basically saying this isn't good enough, and nobody wants to hear that.

Union indeed. And yet the album was a roaring success, returning the now-reformed Yes to the top ten, the album getting to number 7 and 15 in the USA, more or less continuing the success of the last two albums. To some degree, this was built upon by the renewed interest in the band via ABWH, whose only album had also done very well on both sides of the water. However with the much longer songs and the suites on that album, their label saw no hit singles - indeed, nothing that could be played on the radio - and refused to greenlight and bankroll a second attempt, which led to the members reforming with Yes into one band. It probably suited nobody, as Bruford, Wakeman and Howe left after the tour to promote Union; Rabin and Kaye would leave after the next album.

Whether it's ironic or not, the album opens on "I Would Have Waited Forever", with a big a capella performance by Anderson, then a punchy melody very reminiscent of the previous album (as in, Big Generator drives along, Anderson certainly sounding happy to be back. Another great group vocal harmony piece leads into a fine solo vocal from Anderson against a nice acoustic guitar with what may be some digital piano before it takes off again, certainly gets things going with a bang. Those orchestral hits are back again, some trippy echo reverb or something, with a great building guitar riff that powers into a rising solo. This was originally one of the songs slated for the second ABWH album, as are most of the tracks,eight in all.

Another powerful track, the appropriately-named "Shock to the System" opens with an in-your-face hard rock guitar punch that grinds all over the place, and with a twiddly little guitar riff just before the chorus like a leitmotif of sorts. The hooks present in the last three (even four, if you include ABWH) albums are here in abundance, and this is another album I can sing along with, something I can't say of the seventies material. The first of two instrumentals is next as Steve Howe displays his talent on "Masquerade", which slows things down nicely after the exuberant start the album has made. It's calm and relaxed and introspective - it's a Howe acoustic guitar instrumental; what do you want me to tell you?

These were all, if you will, ABWH songs, but "Lift Me Up", which seems to have been the catalyst for the reformation, having been given to Anderson by Rabin so that they'd have a single they could release off their second album, is a Rabin original. Anderson decided instead to explore getting back into Yes and merging the bands, and so here we are. Like almost all of the South African's songs, this is catchy to the max, and you can see why it would have served as a single, with its upbeat, cheerful lyric and hook-laden melody. It is built, of course, on a solid guitar riff as well as keyboard arpeggios which hark back to some of Wakeman's best work with Yes and provides a glance back to their real prog rock days.

A very old-style Anderson piece, "Without Hope You Cannot Start the Day" runs on a lovely Kaye piano melody with some synth backing from Wakeman, the second part kicking into life on Rabin's screeching guitar and a marching drumbeat very reminiscent of "City of Love", this was in fact a song started by Elias and so I guess you'd call it the second "original Yes" track. It's definitely another of the standouts on an album almost of standouts for me, with a great call-and-response vocal from Anderson near the end and some powerful orchestral hits to wrap it up, taking us into another of Rabin's solo efforts, the reggae-influenced "Saving My Heart", on which he plays everything and shares vocals with Anderson. He's even more in control on "Miracle of Life", another of his songs on which this time he sings lead vocals and plays all instruments, with Anderson adding some extra vocals, though his open the song once the vocals begin, which is a few minutes into its seven minute plus run. It absolutely piledrives its way in on rushing drums, busy guitar and piping organ, like something out of Yes's 70s catalogue, and yet somehow fresh and new.

Even the double-tracked a capella vocal is classic seventies Yes, but it's Rabin's song; you'd imagine he must have been listening to albums such as Fragile and Going for the One to have captured such a sound. There's a lush, dramatic synth which trades licks with a frenetic guitar to open "Silent Talking", another ABWH track with another long instrumental in somewhat the vein of early Yes material, Anderson's vocal seeming a little swamped by the music in the first part, the guitar riff surely taken from Asia's debut album. Halfway through the song slows down and rides almost entirely on acoustic guitar backing Anderson's much clearer vocal with harmonic backing.

Another powerful dramatic synth backing for "The More We Live - Let Go", Anderson taking control again, slow hollow drumming punching out the rhythm, very cinematic and stately in its progression. An almost "Riders on the Storm" intro gives way to a clear, angelic vocal from Anderson for "Angkor Wat", very much driven by Wakeman's ethereal keyboard soundscapes and effects, really something that would not be out of place on an Anderson solo album, and ending with a spoken piece in Cambodian. Very zen indeed. Kicking things back into life then, "Dangerous (Look in the Light of What You're Searching For)" shoulders its way past all the poetry and spiritual crap as Rabin hammers through the melody with a big growling guitar riff that, again, you can't help but compare with their number one hit. Orchestral hits and squealing keys attend the track, but it's led by the guitar, which has control pretty much all of the way through. Another pitch-perfect a capella vocal performance, it's a further triumph of the melding of these two entities who prove so much more than the sum of their parts.

"Holding On" is a more old Yes-centric song, a real vehicle for Jon Anderson with its repeated opening vocal, the interesting lyric "When you find the perfect union, you gotta follow it." Definitely in the more progressive rock than pop vein. "Evensong" is fifty seconds of bass and drums which I consider throwaway really and the album ends on "Take the Water to the Mountain", the only solo Anderson-penned track on the entire album, a little plodding and basic, and not what I would have chosen to have ended the album with, but that's almost the only negative thing I have to say about it, despite all the hate it gets from all quarters.

On extra track, released on both the European and Japanese recordings, "Give and Take" is okay but really nothing that special, a sort of straight rock track that jumps along nicely but doesn't, for me, add anything to the album. In fairness, it doesn't detract from it either.

Afterword: It's easy to see this as the natural progression from ABWH's album; many of the tracks have that sort of structure, where they're almost made up of two or three - admittedly much shorter - parts, which could all but qualify them as mini-suites, and you can see how they would have fit on a larger concept album. The melding of 1980s Yes with ABWH works perfectly for me, though the album got almost nothing but criticism. Still one of my favourites, and barely a weak track to be found. Hell, even the band disagree with me, but when has that ever stopped me making up my own mind?

Rating: 9.5/10
Yes or No? Fuck everyone and absolutely Yes!

Somewhat of a red face for me, as I believed up to now that the next Yes album was The Ladder, but it must have been just the next one I got, as it's five years down the line yet. After the release of Union and the already-mentioned departure of three-quarters of what had been ABWH, there were no more real Yes albums for a few years. To fill the gap, no less than three compilations were released, the first being a four-disc box set, Yesyears, released months after Union. This flurry of retrospectives was due to Yes parting company with Atlantic/Atco and signing to Arista (the same label, coincidentally or not, as Asia, where Howe and Downes had both played), part of the deal being that the former label retained the rights to Yes's catalogue up to that point. And what self-respecting label passes up the chance to make a buck out of fans by foisting collections, best-ofs, boxsets and rarities on them?

But of course, one box set is not enough, and so in September we got Yesstory, which is, believe it or not, Yesyears condensed down to two discs, but without the live material and rarities. Finally, they squeezed it down even further and attempted to squeeze more cash out of Yes fans with Highlights: The Very Best of Yes in 1993. Now, I've spoken and ranted at length about this before, but you do have to wonder how the third compilation could be so titled: if it was "the very best of Yes", what were the other two? Nearly the best? Not as good? Grasping fuckers.

Oh yeah: also released in 1993 was An Evening of Yes Music Plus, a live album by Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe which featured about two-thirds of their album and a ton of earlier Yes material, the tour being sort of what started the whole legal trouble off in the first place, as both bands claimed the right to use the Yes name. Anyway, with all that past, finally, in 1994, a now stripped-down and almost back to the classic lineup Yes released their fourteenth studio album.

And it wasn't The Ladder.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/Yes_-_Talk.png)
Album title: Talk
Year: 1994
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Tony Kaye (Hammond Organ) Alan White (Drums, percussion), Trevor Rabin (Guitars, Keyboards)

Comments: This is where I begin my, if you will, future Yes journey. I've heard a few songs from this and other, later albums on playlists, but have never heard any of the albums from here on in all the way through, so this will be new for me. I must say before I begin that Yes seem to be a group fraught with problems. There's that van crash that almost wiped them out at the beginning, the many lineup changes and disagreements, legal woes, financial woes, and I've already written of Rick Wakeman's seriously bad luck, leading to the man being homeless and all but penniless for a long time. Now I read that the label on which this album was released went bust, which hurt its chances of getting the proper exposure. I wonder if anyone thinks there's a curse on Yes? Despite Anderson's spiritual almost transcendent attitude and beliefs, things seldom seem to be calm or simple in the Yes camp.

Be that as it may, Talk opens with acoustic guitar and a vocal harmony before electric bursts in and we're off. I must say, the basic melody reminds me very much of "In the City" by the Eagles. Hmm. Just the main riff. That's probably not good: the only thing Yes songs have reminded me of up to now has been, well, other Yes songs. And Asia ones. It's a pretty catchy song though and a good opener, once again driven by Rabin's guitar licks. "I Am Waiting" seems to be more of a laid-back song (the title perhaps harking back to the opener on Union) with a fine soaraway guitar solo running it in, and a nice soft vocal from Anderson when it comes in, the song thickening up on hard pounding drums and stronger, sharper guitar before falling back to the gentler tone of the opening.

Chris Squire's thumping pulsing bass leads in "Real Love", joined by Rabin's slightly phased guitar, but I would say that so far, these tracks have not been as immediately accessible as were those on Union; they take longer to get going, but when they do they're pretty damn good. Is that enough? Guess we'll see. The usual Yes vocal harmonies are on display of course, but I don't see the same hooks that were on the other album, not yet anyway. The odd echo effect on Anderson's vocal seems to me to be completely pointless. Rabin is in fine form, but the length of the tracks is a concern: I don't think any of them need to be this long and they do sound - especially here, at almost nine minutes - dragged out unnecessarily.

We're basically machine-gunned down by guitar riffs as "State of Play" explodes out of the speakers, the close-harmony work here excellent, but I will say I don't hear too much of the keyboards and wonder if Rabin has decided to push them to one side in favour of his guitar? I honestly can't say I'm fond of this track at all. It has its moments but mostly it's annoying. The only song, so far as I can see, written with an outside songwriter, "Walls" features a credit for ex-Supertramp founder Roger Hodgson, and has for me quite a 1973 ELO feel about it. I hear a lot of Hodgson's solo work here, lyrics like "I want to love/I want to give/I want to find another way to give" reflecting those from his "Give Me Love, Give Me Life" off his debut In the Eye of the Storm. A good enough song but not a Yes song, not for me.

"Where Will You Be" slows things down somewhat, running on a sort of marimba line with a certain Caribbean flavour and a nice chanted vocal, but there's a weird sense of some sort of musical or show tune about this song, can't quite put my finger on it. Just sounds, I don't know, wrong somehow. Also pretty boring. The album ends on a sort of three-part suite, which goes under the umbrella title of "Endless Dream". The first part is the introduction, on fast rippling piano and groaning guitar. It runs for just under 2 minutes and is titled "Endless Dream: Silent Spring" which then leads into the main theme, which is also basically the title track. "Endless Dream: Talk" runs for just under 12 minutes, opening on a sort of continuation of the piano line from the intro, though slower and with Anderson coming in on the vocal now, and it's pretty laid-back and relaxed until about a third of the way in.

Strange, quirky little synth sounds that could be being added to by a guitar talk box (which would be appropriate, given the album title) sputter all over the place, seeming incongruous to me, not at all sure why they're there, then it slips back into the more gentle groove the song has been running in, making the "interruption" even more weird and less understandable. Halfway through now and there are more standard synthscapes being laid down, very much in the old school Yes/prog rock way, the sort of thing you would imagine Wakeman might have enjoyed getting his teeth into. Goes a bit dark and dramatic then, with a certain sense of Pink Floyd circa A Momentary Lapse of Reason, as Anderson comes back in with the vocal, joined now by Rabin. Essentially though this is close to a 12-minute instrumental and a vehicle for both Rabin's guitar and synthwork. I like the almost hymnal quality of the closing vocal, then it's another two minutes of "Endless Dream: Endless Dream" to close the album with a pleasant little instrumental.


Afterword: I'd have to say I'm disappointed. Three years down the line and with the loss of the trio, Yes have almost reverted to their pre-Fragile days. The appearance of an epic as the closing track is clear evidence of this, and while the opening two tracks certainly have their hooks and their commercial appeal, much of the rest is overextended, bloated, and pretty much unnecessary. Instead of continuing to trim the fat, as they have been with the last three albums, Yes seem to have been adding it, and while there are only 9 tracks on this album, there's less important music than on the last one. I'm not going to remember any of these tracks; I'm certainly not going to be singing any of them.

Rating: 7/10
Yes or No? Not really, no.

I must admit, I've never heard of such a thing, but between 1996 and 1997 Yes decided to record new studio material but release it on a double album along with live material, so essentially you have a live album followed by some new studio stuff on the second disc. Then they did it again. These albums are entitled Keys to Ascension amd Keys to Ascension 2, and I was wondering if it was even worth my time reviewing them, as the vast majority of the music is live versions of stuff I've already heard, and I don't do live albums anyway.

Then I found out that the studio material from both albums was gathered together and put on a "compilation" album called Keys Studio, which makes more sense for me to review. However that only came out in 2001, so what I intend to do is leave both Keys to Ascension albums, continue on and then do Keys Studio when it comes up. Clear? No? Tough.

As it happens, the next "proper" studio album also hit the shelves in 1997. And this is it.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/39/Open_Your_Eyes.jpg)
Album title: Open Your Eyes
Year: 1997
Personnel: Jon Anderson (Vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Billy Sherwood (Guitars, Keyboards) Alan White (Drums, percussion), Steve Howe (Guitars)

Comments: Tony Kaye is gone, so is previous leading light Trevor Rabin, and there's a new man on the keys and indeed the guitars, backing up the return of Steve Howe. Okay he's not a new man: Billy Sherwood has been involved with Yes since 1989, had joined the sessions to write what became Union (and had been considered as the lead vocalist in the absence of Jon Anderson) but then sort of dispensed with when the main man returned. This album seems to be something of a Frankenstein's monster, composed of original material written almost exclusively by Squire and Sherwood, and also some music used for, on, or intended for their other band, Conspiracy.

It's a heavy rocking start with those familiar vocal harmonies as "New State of Mind" kicks things off, a pretty exuberant feel to it, and perhaps a message in the title? After all, this is now pretty much Squire and Sherwood's band, Anderson and Howe only involved in terms of how they perform, neither involved really in the writing, despite being given songwriting credits. Seems to be a lot of stabbing brass here, probably on synth of course, but not a bad opener, and then the title track sort of reminds me of a cross between Asia and Journey, quite AOR in its makeup, keeps the pace pretty rapid and uptempo and it definitely has a great energy about it, perhaps even a new new Yes sound?

A very orchestral sound to complement the acoustic guitar intro to "Universal Garden", the pace slackening here but reminding me somewhat of ABWH's "Order of the Universe" at times. "No Way We Can Lose" is a simple little tune that isn't good or bad, it's just, well, there, though the harmonica is a nice touch. I find "Fortune Teller" to be a real throwback to their early days, which of course doesn't please me, and I have to say I become very bored with it very quickly, my old problem with 70s Yes music resurfacing in the good old 1990s. Sigh. There's a more dramatic, ominous feel to "Man in the Moon", but already it's getting harder and harder to care.

"Wonderlove" is somewhat more of a proper Yes song, a slower one with nice vocal harmonies, but that bugbear of mine, no hook to hang my interest on, is back to annoy me. None of these songs are in the least memorable, until we get to the shortest track, the first real ballad, though "From the Balcony" sounds very familiar, and I think it's almost an acoustic, slowed-down version of the opener? I guess "Love Shine" is not without its charm, but I don't think all that much of it, and "Somehow, Someday", though it starts off as a nice little pastoral acoustic ballad then turns into a slow marching anthem that does nothing for me. Yeah, even the little hints towards Ireland in the lyric don't attract me, sorry.

I originally looked in horror at the closer, to see it was almost 1974 again - 24 minutes long! But the notes say the song is only 5 minutes, then 2 minutes silence, then a "hidden track" which is over 16 minutes of birdsong, vocal snippets and effects. I mean, why? What's the fucking point? Is this not indulgence and arrogance taken to the nth level? What possible interest could anyone, even the most diehard Yes fan, have in listening to such nonsense for over a quarter of an hour? Words fail me. Well, they don't, obviously. What's "The Solution" like anyway, after all that? It's all right I guess, but I've just lost heart by now.

Afterword: If Talk was a disappointment, this is like learning Santa Claus don't exist (ssh! I'll tell you later) as there really is nothing decent I can point to here, and I feel like I've come back almost full circle. The songs are not memorable, don't inspire me, don't interest me and in general I find this album exceedingly boring, and forgettable.

Rating: 5/10
Yes or No? Absolutely no.
So now I've sort of reached a crossroads. I thought things were getting better, but Yes seem to have erased all the, as I see it, good music that characterised at least four albums during the 1980s and early 1990s, and gone right back to the boring, incomprehensible and unattractive music they purveyed all through the 1970s and early 1980s, and which did not interest me.

So, do I go on? Suppose I have to. I have seven albums left in their discography, including that Keys Studio thing, and I'm not going to leave a project half-finished. But I think I'll take a break now to reflect, listen to other music and push Yes to one side for a while. I just don't feel like listening to them now for a bit. I'll come back to this, no doubt, but I have to admit, I won't be in any hurry to do so.