Artist Rundown: Yes (Part 4)

Artist Rundown is a periodic feature in which I briefly share my thoughts, memories and opinions of an artist or group's entire recorded work in chronological order. First up is one of the bands which helped developed my love of and taste in music: progressive rock legends Yes.

Yes - Fragile (1971)

It's hard to believe that in the span of one year Yes released not one, but two critically acclaimed classic albums. Certainly the group was riding the crest of a creative wave, one that would last, according to most fans and critics, for the better part of the next six years.

While The Yes Album had been the band's breakout success, something was needed to make the picture complete. Enter classically trained keyboardist Rick Wakeman, who replaced Tony Kaye at the conclusion of The Yes Album tour. Wakeman brought to the band a more demonstrative and tonally diverse approach to the keyboards, as well as a solid foundation in musical theory that gave the band's compositional chops a major boost.

Here, the group builds on the "great leap forward" of the last album, expanding their vocabulary with increasingly complex arrangements and song structures. The opener, the up-tempo "Roundabout," was a smash hit on American FM radio, helping propel the LP to the No. 4 spot on the Billboard albums chart. Imagine a song with all those tempo changes, dizzying breaks and complex instrumental parts breaking through the mainstream today ...

Overall, the production is magnificent -- a multi-layered wonderworld that must have floored early-70's audiences. This is best exemplified by "South Side of the Sky," whose ghostly, wordless harmonies and ominous piano breaks tread ground that Yes would seldom touch on in the future. "Heart of the Sunrise" also goes down a storm, serving as the best execution of Yes' symphonic tension-release ambitions up to this point.

About a quarter of the album is dedicated to five short solo pieces, each demonstrating the individual skills of the band. Squire and Howe's are probably the most iconic, the former a rollicking jam comprised almost entirely of overdubbed basses playing in various registers and the latter being a beautiful solo classical guitar piece. Wakeman's Moog-enhanced treatment of Brahms' Symphony No. 4 is probably the least exciting of the bunch, but at least it only clocks in at 1:38.

The less die-hard consider this to be Yes' best effort, and I can certainly sympathize with their case. I still give the nod to Close to the Edge as the band's finest achievement, and even prefer the more straight ahead approach of The Yes Album. Nonetheless, this stands in the Top 5 of Yes' greatest achievements and is an album no serious rock collection should go without.

Artist Rundown: Yes (Part 3)

Artist Rundown is a periodic feature in which I briefly share my thoughts, memories and opinions of an artist or group's entire recorded work in chronological order. First up is one of the bands which helped developed my love of and taste in music: progressive rock legends Yes.

Yes - The Yes Album (1971)

While Peter Banks laid the framework for what a Yes guitarist should more or less sound like, it took the flashy, twelve-fingered fretwork of rock/jazz/country virtuoso Steve Howe to finally propel the band to stardom. Yes, it's clear that his presence has upped the stakes for all involved -- the band's songwriting and arrangements are tighter, more focused and more well-formed than ever, even as the song lengths continue to expand.

The nine-minute opener "Yours Is No Disgrace" could be in the running for greatest Yes song ever, starting with an immensely catchy stop-start riff that leads into a galloping rhythm over which Howe lays his trademark licks. The whole band shares vocal duties in a rather CSNY-inspired manner for the first section before Howe takes the reins with a fabulous stereo-panned guitar riff, giving way to some of the most exhilarating guitar-based band interplay ever committed to tape.

If "Yours" is more a musical journey than a traditional "song," "Starship Trooper" is perhaps a warmer and more relateable take on Yes' cosmic message. It starts off with a pastoral -- yet no less astral-sounding -- melodic section before launching into a repetitive, monolithic groove that builds and builds the tension before crashing down on an absolutely breathtaking rock guitar crescendo from Mr. Howe. Who said progressive rock lacks emotional power?

For their troubles, the band received a peak spot of No. 4 on the British albums chart (and the somewhat less impressive No. 40 peak spot on the U.S. Billboard albums chart). This was largely due to the group's breakout hit, the two-part "Your Move/I've Seen All Good People." The song is a major accomplishment indeed, fusing a beautiful, folky melody with a rollicking climax and a hook that seemingly doesn't know when to stop.

The crowning achievement of the record, at least from a technical perspective, is the final piece, "Perpetual Change." Here the band combine their customarily beautiful melodicism with their most complex instrumentation to date, culminating in the dizzying middle section in which two complex riffs are played against each other in each stereo channel.

So, the band's skill finally matches its ambition, and with energy to spare. What to do next?

Artist Rundown: Yes (Part 2)

Artist Rundown is a periodic feature in which I briefly share my thoughts, memories and opinions of an artist or group's entire recorded work in chronological order. First up is one of the bands which helped developed my love of and taste in music: progressive rock legends Yes.

Yes - Time and a Word (1970)

The music is more or less in the same direction as the debut, only with a little more sprawl, a full orchestra on every song and preachy, hip-at-the-time "love is all you need" lyrics. Of course, this datedness would render any objective critical assessment unduly harsh, so good thing I love Squire's increasingly aggressive bass and Anderson's earnest vocals to pieces.

From the beginning it is clear the group is trying to up the instrumental ante, with the opening Richie Havens cover "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed" centering itself around a catchy, muscular bassline that seems to just keep going and going. "Everydays," a song written by Stephen Stills and originally performed by The Byrds, starts out airy and mysterious before giving way to a thrashing middle section that combines punk-like speed and aggression with Banks' usual jazz-rock guitar heroics.

Also of note is the beautiful title track, which borrows just a little bit from "All You Need Is Love" but still manages to overcome its inherent schmaltziness thanks to Anderson's sincere, unaffected vocal. Elsewhere, "Sweet Dreams" is a wonderfully catchy single-length tune that manages to convey a feeling of optimism without coming off as too overbearing. I even groove on "Clear Days," a much-maligned track with Anderson crooning about everybody being together forever or somesuch over a syrupy string section and piano.

This would be the last attempt by Yes to record an album with a symphony orchestra until 2001's Magnification, and it's not hard to see why. The orchestra adds some nice color to the proceedings, but it is not used in a particularly imaginative way, save for some impressive atmospheric flourishes on "Everydays." I guess they didn't too much like the results, either -- the idea left Banks so pissed off he left the group for good shortly after the album's release.

Postscript: Hilariously, the American edition of this album features his replacement Steve Howe in the group photo on the cover.

Artist Rundown: Yes (Part 1)

Artist Rundown is a periodic feature in which I briefly share my thoughts, memories and opinions of an artist or group's entire recorded work in chronological order. First up is one of the bands which helped developed my love of and taste in music: progressive rock legends Yes.

Yes - Yes (1969)

When I first read about this album, it was described as light, jazzy 60's pop. While those influences are definitely apparent, it's clear by the end of the the first track that, even this early, these guys had a rough blueprint of the basic Yes sound. Chris Squire's trebly, distorted Rickenbacker bass sound is already fully developed and pleasingly loud in the mix, and he and drummer Bill Bruford lock horns throughout the record to incredible effect. Meanwhile, the woefully underrated Peter Banks (R.I.P.) lays down all manner of jazzy, major-key lead lines that prove he pioneered the Yes guitar sound two years before his replacement by Steve Howe.

The group's propensity toward clever arrangements is already evident in the jammed-out, quasi-symphonic treatment of The Beatles' "Every Little Thing" and the closing micro-epic "Survival." Also of note is singer Jon Anderson's songwriting, which is surprisingly warm and tender given the abstract approach he would take to lyric writing for the better part of the '70s. "Yesterday and Today" and "Sweetness" are both gorgeous, gentle love ballads without a trace of the sentimentality that would plague Anderson's later attempts in this area.

Postscript: The 2003 expanded edition includes several essential bonus tracks, including a rare single version of "Everydays" and an epic, seven-minute B-side called "Something's Coming" that just about blew me away when I first heard it (yes, that's "Something's Coming," as in West Side Story -- just give it a listen).

Random Record Review: SBB - Karlstad Live (2001)

SBB - Karlstadt Live (2001; recorded 1975)
This is a fantastic live album by a band I don't much care for. Yes, on paper, Polish '70s progressive rockers SBB sound like the kind of guys I'd get along with: top-notch musicianship, extended improvisation and innumerable live archive releases in which no song is played the same way twice. But they never quite held my interest, focusing too much on meandering keyboard and vocal parts while never quite matching the ambition of their more intricate instrumental passages.

A recording from SBB's first tour of Scandinavia in 1975, this album finds the group in a state of apparent transition, carving a space somewhere between the rough, blues-influenced hard rock of the early '70s and the kind of menacing jazz-rock jams favored on the band's contemporaneous albums. Guitarist Apostolis Anthimos' McLaughlin-esque guitar flourishes are now pushed to the forefront, and the music is all the better for it. When his rapid clusters of fuzzed-up phrases spray over the the slow boil of the band's ominous two-chord vamps, the effect is nothing less than intoxicating. Even bandleader Jozef Skrzek's vocals are an improvement, coming off as much rougher and blusier than in the studio. Indeed, one could argue at this point the band was the closest you'd ever get to a Zeppelin-Mahavishu hybrid.

This approach is best exemplified by the first two tracks, "Pretty Face" and "Born to Die," not coincidentally the best 20-minute stretch of the album. But perhaps the most unusual track is "Clouds," a non-trivial four-and-a-half-minute atmospheric piece in which Skrzek's electric piano and organ slowly build a fantastic level of tension before launching into another heavy guitar showcase, the all-instrumental "Stormy Bay." "Wonderful Sky-Ride" is closer to the style of the first two tracks, only more overtly minor-key and with a few tape faults revealing the off-air origins of this broadcast recording.

Unfortunately, the album is not without its missteps, namely the closing "Return to the South." Despite the blues-portending title, the track is more stylistically typical of the band's approach to jamming at the time -- an uninteresting/repetitive drum beat, no riff to speak of and lots of monotonous guitar and synth soloing. All for nine minutes. Enjoy.

As keyboardist/vocalist Jozef Skrzek says in the opening moments of this recording, the music performed at this concert was made "only for today" and would never be repeated. Unfortunately, this meant the group would soon abandon this heavier approach for the epic, sprawling prog of Pamięć and Ze Słowem Biegnę Do Ciebie. But given the ever-changing nature of SBB, it seems appropriate that the only night where they got it exactly right would ultimately be just a footnote in the long career of a band that never seemed content to settle into comfortable repetition.