This is the third part of the Owlbadger guide to Yes. It covers, what I’m calling their ‘late classic period’, the albums: Tales From Topographic Oceans, Relayer, and Going For The One. This period is far more patchy in terms of quality than the ‘early classic period’, but features two Yes masterpieces that cannot be missed and much other music that any Yes fan will enjoy.
- Part 1. Introduction and Early Albums
- Part 2. Early Classic Period
- Part 3. Late Classic Period
- Part 4. The Rest (to come)
After the triumph of Close to the Edge, the next album, Tales From Topographic Oceans, is a disappointment. It’s become legendary in the progressive rock canon as exhibit A in the case for the prosecution for self indulgence. It’s hugely ambitious, a double album of four songs, one on each side, and all around 20 minutes long. Largely composed by Steve Howe and Jon Anderson during the Close to the Edge tour, with input from Chris Squire and Rick Wakeman. Alan White apparently contributed some music, although this is not acknowledged in the album notes. Unfortunately the execution does not match the ambition and the end result is over extended and rambling, with the band often sounding rather tired. It’s easy to lose interest in an 80 minute piece of music; Rick Wakeman certainly had, and, after the tour to promote the album, he left.
For this review I listened to the whole thing from end to end, probably for the first time since I bought it as a teenager. It’s hard work. Some of the individual parts are nice enough and in places are some of the the most beautiful melodies and musical ideas that Yes have ever produced, but only two the four songs bare repeated listening and even they are an effort. There’s very little musical journey or progression, it just feels like some unrelated musical ideas following into each other.
The Revealing Science of God, the first track has some nice parts and feels like the most complete piece of the four. Its many sections move quite nicely from one to the other, but as I said above, there’s little sense of progression, just one thing following another with a few repeating themes. From around 18.30 there’s a rather wonderful Wakeman moog solo, it’s a welcome surprise after what’s come before, but it’s a brief moment of excitement that’s over quickly and then we’re back to the slow turgid pace of the rest of the piece.
The second track, The Remembering, features a first half of somewhat dull singing without any great melodic content. The middle ‘Relayer’ section reminds me a little of Jethro Tull in it’s guitar riff and for a while there’s a hint of Yes in better, more uptempo times, but it doesn’t really go anywhere and too soon we’re back into an amorphous soundscape before wrapping up with the ending hymn-like song.
The third track kicks off with some quite interesting percussion and phased bass backing a Steve Howe abstract guitar solo, but as with the rest of Topographic Oceans it goes on for far too long without going anywhere. The whole track is mostly a rather indulgent Howe guitar solo with the occasional composed pieces briefly appearing. It ends with some nice acoustic guitar and a simple Anderson song “I heard a million voices singing”, but as a whole it’s probably the worst track of the four.
Ritual, the last track, is, along with The Revealing Science of God, the only other one worth coming back to, with a nice main theme introducing the piece and an attractive sung melody, “Nous Sommes Du Soleil”. From the middle of the piece we’re into a long instrumental jam before finally returning to the song at the end. It would have made a very nice 7 minute song and with a bit more focus could have turned into something really excellent.
It’s worth repeating that there is some very nice music hidden deep within the 80 minutes, but it’s just not worth the effort to get to them. There are certainly enough ideas here for the two sides of a single album. Could a more engaged Wakeman have helped knock into shape? Sorely missing is the awesome power of Yes in top gear, a Heart of the Sunrise or a Siberian Khatru; it’s like a very very long And You and I. Why the relative artistic failure after the triumph of Close to the Edge? It’s obviously over ambitious, but maybe it was also too much of an Anderson/Howe project that left Squire and certainly Wakeman sidelined? Was losing Bruford a bigger blow than anyone recognised at the time? Would he have called time on it and got it down to a more manageable size? We’ll never know.
Wakeman was replaced by Swiss keyboard player Patrick Moraz after Yes approached and were rejected by Keith Emerson, then at the hight of his success with ELP. The next album Relayer was a return to the format of Close to the Edge with a single 22 minute piece on one side of the album, The Gates of Delirium and two 9 minute songs on the other side, Sound Chaser and To Be Over.
The Gates of Delirium is Yes at their finest; equal parts beautiful Anderson melodies with some of his best lyrics, apparently based on War and Peace, and fused with an awesome arrangement of stunning complexity. While Yes had used the classical trick of introducing a number of musical themes and then repeating them in variations, TGoD shows them taking it to a new level of mastery. While there are several distinct sections, they don’t feel like unrelated pieces simply joined together, which was the case some of their previous pieces, especially true of Topographic Oceans, instead they work as a well constructed whole with a sense of progression and themes reappearing in different guises throughout.
The track kicks off with a very impressive overture showcasing the main theme and featuring some excellent interplay between Howe and Moraz. At about 2 minutes the main song starts and we are treated to peak Yes as Anderson and Squire sing over a wonderful bubbling arrangement interspersed with variations on the main theme. The Gates of Delirium has some of Anderson’s best lyrics, as he deals with the emotions of war and conflict:
Stand the marchers soaring talons
Peaceful lives will not deliver freedom
Wars that shout in screams of anguish
Power spent passion bespoils our soul receiver
The pen won’t stay the demon’s wings, the hour approaches
Pounding out the Devil’s sermon
From around 8 minutes we are launched into a frantic instrumental section where Howe and Moraz again trade solos around a new theme while Squire and White deliver a blistering backing track. The instrumental gets gradually more and more crazed until we’re into a full-on ‘battle section’ with various crashing effects and some very angular arrangements. This eventually resolves into a Moraz variation on the battle theme on synthesizer continued by Howe on slide. This instrumental section arguably goes on a little too long, especially the atonal battle scene, but it’s so well structured that it can be forgiven. It’s worth bearing with because it eventually dissolves at around 15 minutes into one of Jon Anderson’s loveliest melodies, the ‘Soon’ song that winds up proceedings. ‘Soon’ was later edited down to 4 minutes and released as a single. TGoD is a triumph, the equal of anything else they ever did and one of my personal favourites. It should definitely be a priority listen for any aspiring Yes fan. It also marks the last time a single track took the whole side of an album.
The other two tracks also somewhat echo the format of Close to the Edge. They make up the second side of the album, and there is a complex fast track, Sound Chaser, and a slower more melodic one, To Be Over, somewhat similar to the difference between Siberian Khatru and And You And I. In quality though, the difference between the two albums couldn’t be greater, white the two Close To The Edge tracks would be high on any Yes fan’s list of their favourites, the two on Relayer are mostly forgotten. It’s as if the entire creative energy of the band was channelled into TGoD, and the rest of the album was completed with afterthoughts. They are not dreadful though, and are worth a listen.
Sound Chaser sounds as if Yes, and particularly Steve Howe, have been challenged to a competition of musical virtuosity. One of the pleasures of Yes, is that the astonishing musicianship, arguably at the peak of what 70’s rock has to offer, is typically channeled into supporting the composition and rarely an end in itself. For all the later charges of self-indulgence, they rarely strayed into the outright ‘notes for notes sake’ rabbit-hole of 70’s fusion. But Sound Chaser does feel as if Howe has decided to show everyone how many notes he can play in a very short space of time. It’s incredibly frantic, all the way from the almost continuous drum fill of the intro, through the manic main riff, which Anderson and Squire bravely sing over and then into the main event, an incredible, somewhat flamenco-esque, Howe guitar solo. It feels like solo for solo sake though and the rest of the song simply an excuse for it. It plays out quite forgettably with some manic cha-chas. However, there is an excellent Moraz moog solo at the end.
To Be Over is more a return to the old Yes, slow and melodic, just not a very good version of the old Yes. It’s a bit of a plod, with far too much time repeating variations on the dull main theme and not much else to recommend it. The final climactic vocal harmony section is quite nice.
This album has a rather different sound from their previous releases. Howe changed his main guitar to a Fender Telecaster, which gives it a sharper, brighter, but in places quite harsh sound. I much prefer the tone of his earlier ES175 and ES335 Gibson hollow-bodies. Moraz’s style is also very different, more abstract, jazz influenced with little of Wakeman’s classical baroque style. His choice of keyboards is different too, more synthesizers, more electric than acoustic piano and almost no organ. The album was co-produced and engineered again by Eddie Offord, but this was to be his last album with Yes.
It was also the last album for a while to feature artwork by Roger Dean. It depicts a cave like castle in blues and greys, with a snake curled in the foreground and several warriors riding over a bridge in the distance. It fits very well with the sound and subject matter of the music, and was, apparently, a favourite of Dean’s.
Going For The One (GFTO) featured the return of Rick Wakeman. The art of songwriting and composition re-established its rightful place with virtuosity and technical pyrotechnics somewhat subdued compared to Relayer. Like Relayer it’s an album of two sides with the second being by far the best.
The album kicks off with the title track, a rollicking good tune with Howe’s slide guitar front and centre, giving a somewhat country feel. Were Yes attempting a successful single here I wonder? It has all the characteristic of a straightforward pop/rock song with a standard verse-chorus middle-eight format. It’s OK, but not really what one listens to Yes for, and other bands do this kind of thing better. Next up is Turn of the Century, leading off with an Anderson love song simply accompanied by Howe’s acoustic guitar. It’s not one of their best melodies, so the whole thing is rather unengaging and doesn’t really feel as if it goes anywhere. It completely oversays its welcome too, dragging on through several instrumental sections, none of which redeem it. The first side ends with Parallels, another up-tempo rocker that features Wakeman playing a church organ, giving it a certain grandeur. It’s a good tune with some interesting parts, but overall the arrangement sounds a bit lazy and the church organ gets a bit tiresome after a while. Excellent bass riff from Squire though.
While side one is OK, the real reason to listen to GFTO is the two songs on side two. It starts with Wonderous Stories, a lovely little tune, with some excellent synth playing from Wakeman. It was released as a single and became their highest charting in the UK. It’s followed by the meat of side two, Awaken, the masterpiece of this album. An Anderson-Howe composition similar in length to Close to the Edge at 15.31. It starts with a quiet intro of piano music followed by some ethereal chords with Anderson singing one of the main melodies. The main Howe riff then enters with the full band and the Awaken theme sung by Anderson and Squire. There’s a stunning Howe solo, one of his best I think, before we return back to the riff and theme with variations, then a typically Wakeman-esque baroque interlude followed by the Workings of Man theme. The first section ends with a descent to the middle section. Yes had tried to do quiet and ethereal middle sections a few times before, notably in Close to the Edge, with limited success, but here they nail it beautifully. It’s a wonderful piece of music. A simple bass riff drones while Wakeman plays a succession of variations on a melody around it. Howe’s guitar enters over some modulations and works to a glorious crescendo. It’s sublime. We return to the Workings of Man theme another guitar solo and a brief visit from our old friend the church organ, all building to a very Wakeman climax. It ends with a reprise of the introduction’s ethereal music and song.
The production on GFTO is its most disappointing aspect. 70’s rock music is, in many ways, the peak of electro-mechanical music. The transition from acoustic had been in progress through the first half of the 20th century and by the end of 60’s the art of recording to tape and the various techniques used to support it had reached a sublime peak, typified by records such as Abbey Road and The Dark Side of the Moon. It was not only the recording process, but the instruments as well. The electric guitar had found its own voice in the hands of Hendrix and Clapton, as had the electric bass. Electro-mechanical keyboards such as the tonewheel organ and electric piano also added their rich textures to rock. Unfortunately all this was to change in the late 70’s and especially into the 80’s. The very first intrusion of purely digital instruments and processing equipment, although it must have seemed new and exciting at the time, now sound like a big step backwards in retrospect. This was especially true with GFTO. It suffers dreadfully from the loss of Yes’s long time producer and engineer Eddie Offord and the band’s attempt at self producing. The sound is drenched in digital echo and reverb to the real detriment of the music. It sounds much of the time as if one is listening to the band from the other end of a digital cathedral. The other late 70’s arrival that really hurts this record is Wakeman’s new polymoog synthesiser. It’s everywhere, and to modern ears sounds like a toy. So much worse than the rich and complex timbres of a hammond organ.
The album art is a disappointment too. They ditched Roger Dean, apparently at the instigation of John Anderson, and used the Hipgnosis studio instead. Hipgnosis are of course famous for their Pink Floyd album covers featuring beautiful photography and graphics. Their GFTO cover was not one of their better ones however, and the image of a naked man standing in front of crazily angled skyscrapers doesn’t really work as an image, and has nothing to add to the music.
Thus comes to an end the period of Yes with anything really special to listen to. In my personal opinion, there’s nothing that follows that matches this ‘Classic Yes’ period. In part 4, I’ll cover the subsequent history of the band.
Part 4. The Rest (to come)