why late at night in the u.s. does ilm get all yessed out

http://yes.iq.pl/images/jade_sea.jpg

Caesar's Palace, morning glory, silly human silly human siillllyy huuuuuuman race....

http://www.doheth.co.uk/profiles/cbg.gif

I fucking love "Yours Is No Disgrace" so damn much. What a beautiful, beautiful song. Howe's playing on the whole Yes Album just blows me away.

I grew listening to WIOT out of Toledo, Ohio, and when 90120 came out they used to play "Our Song" all the time because it had that line "Toledo is just another stop along the good king's highway". Like, they actually thought it was about Toledo, Ohio!!

Yes fans jonesing for more YESSOUNDS should totally check out those two latter-day Os Mutantes LPs, by the way. When they got all progged-out. Total Yes homages.

I thought "yessed out" was some sort of cockney slang for "sucking it's own dick" or somethin'.

Your mention of the "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" video reminded me there was one version that had a guy with maggots crawling around on top of his closed eyelids. Did "Fear Factor" rip off this idea? I think MTV stopped showing that version.

i love yes. sometimes i'll be walking around and suddenly a bass line from some yes song will pop into my head and i'll be all excited.

would that ilm actually were a bit more yessed out.

One of my (many) large gaps of musical knowledge is rock of any variety from 1970-1985 or so.

Wobbly, if you're out there, tell your Jon Anderson at NAMM story . . .

best

Drew

at a booth that sells vocoder software there is a man earnestly saying in a silvery, elven speaking voice reminiscent of Glinda the Good Witch "no, no, NO, you don't understand. I want to make my computer-" and here he erupts into a shivery high melodious flutter "s-i-i-iing!" and it's HIM and he's singing the word "sing" in THAT Yes voice.

What is NAMM, anyway?

I just watched some of that DVD "The Future Is Wild", the cheezy computer animated forecast of what freakish species will dominate this planet in 200 million years. It was very Yessed out too, CGI supercontinent-formation footage and giant global oceans (topographic tales of .. .)

http://stat.discogs.com/R/262506-1103102672.jpg

Olias of Sunhillow Critical Edition, with commentary track guest starring the 'scientists' from The Future Is Wild

maybe a little like the trevor horn yes (or maybe i just wish it sounded more like trevor horn yes).

it's basically arp-heavy metronomic 1978 eurosynth cheese.

I always see a Dean landscape, or some Art Nouveau P. Craig Russell planet landscape whenever I listen to Yes. Except for Yes mach-90125 and onward.

Or what Moodles said

One listen to Kaye's post-Yes band Badger tells you where he was at musically, kind of blues prog. I don't think they'd have made Close to the Edge with him still there. Topographic Oceans neither, but that's another story.

The Yes Album and Fragile would both be much better with the shorter songs excised, other than Long Distance Runaround/The Fish.

Another way to look at is that Kaye was willing to chug away and let Howe take the lead. With Wakeman, you end up having two lead instrumental voices battling it out for space.

Do you mean "Clap" and "A Venture " from the Yes Album? Really disagree there.

Xp

Squire was always the lead instrumentalist but yes fine ;)

I like Fragile a lot too, though!

The three epic tracks are all amazing, "Long Distance Runaround" is delightful, and the short solo excursions are nice diversions.

Squire is much more melodic than your average bass player, but he still mostly plays the traditional bass role with Howe and Wakeman often layering in lead squiggles over the top.

I thought the shorter tracks on The Yes Album and Fragile broke the flow, although they're not bad in and of themselves (with the exception of "Cans & Brahms", which is the worst track Yes ever put to tape by a long way and I'm including "Circus of Heaven" in that).

Squire is much more melodic than your average bass player, but he still mostly plays the traditional bass role with Howe and Wakeman often layering in lead squiggles over the top.

This is where it all started going wrong on Topographic Oceans for me, the keys and bass are more like colouring or back-up instruments while Howe and Anderson wank off endlessly on top.

hey frogbs how's it sounding? i've been spinning Olias Of Sunhillow and it is great when i'm in the right mood. i keep waiting for it to start.

was pretty fucking amazing. I've always wanted a copy of Olias, should probably pull the trigger on that some day. judging by my last haul apparently I am in the "get all the 74-76 solo albums" phase now

IMO Fragile is better than TYA but I guess I'll have to confirm this when the sun goes down (4:30 PM)

I heard the first two albums long after I knew the rest of the catalogue, and I was surprised to find that Time and a Word featured Kaye much more than the Yes Album did. Of course, Peter Banks was a much more retiring guitarist than Howe, so it may be that Kaye stepped up when there was more room to fill, and stepped back as Howe took the reins. I guess it's also worth noting the Kaye only took 1/5 songwriting credit on a single song in his three albums with the band.

One thing that I read awhile ago that might not be apparent from the records or the credits was how much Wakeman had to do with coming up with transitions between musical bits; since he was the only one with a serious musical education, he knew the "proper" way to resolve and combine the parts that the others contributed.

I think Eddie Offord's editing skills were a big part of corralling the chaos into coherent musical pieces too, although I suspect that aspect of his contribution was sidelined to some extent by the time they did Topographic Oceans as the egos got out of hand.

IN the meantime, the dregs of current Yes have put out an album as Arc of Life

Here's a video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_84UCEDeEkc

This album sounds exactly how you'd expect an album featuring Billy Sherwood, Jimmy Haun, Jay Schellen (Alan White's replacement/double) and Jon Davidson to sound: like lukewarm oatmeal. It's better than Heaven and Earth though.

Speaking of Davison if you really need a Yes fix you might want to check out his former band Glass Hammer

They’ve got a lot of good ones but If and Cor Coridum very much have a “what if Yes stayed the course after Going For the One” vibe to them

I love "Circus of Heaven". Definitely not near their worst.

I've said it before but those long weird meandering solos on "The Ancient" are really weird and beautiful, I've never heard anything else like that.

I enjoy "Cans & Brahms" for what it is tbh, a quick Wendy Carlos-style arrangement sketch. I know people hate it.

Seems far too short and breezy to be hateable.

I dislike it mostly because its prominent placement on the record can give people the idea that Yes is about "playing rock versions of classical music" like ELP, when that wasn't what they did at all.

As for the question of "What is the weakest Yes original released between 1969 and 1980", I might pick "Clap" or "Onward".

Oh, yeah, it's not the best introduction, especially coming right after the hit.

Hating "Clap" is madness, though.

that little bruford drumroll during the applause right before "starship trooper" launches rules

Howe's guitar sounds unpleasantly trebly on "Clap", and it seems like an exercise. I prefer the warmer classical guitar on "Mood for a Day".

i love "a venture". it's jaunty and trippy. it would have been a highlight on either of the first two albums, where anderson's lyrics were more often linear and narrative

god the yes album is just perfect

Okay, I just played "A Venture" and it seems I'd been mixing it up with "We Have Heaven", it's actually a nice little number. So that's a thumbs-up from me too. Steve Howe's Chet Atkins fantasies can still bog off though. I'm tempted to play "Circus of Heaven" now to see if it's less embarrassing than I remember.

It's pretty weak.

i love that they got one of the dudes from gnidrolog to play record on the first movement of "i've seen all good people", and they go from that into howe totally vamping in the second movement, into "a venture" and the space lounge of "perpetual change." as great as this record is it still sounds so weird

I think he played a steel-string on both pieces? xps

Matt #2 - you don't like "We Have Heaven"?

I have fond memories of singing "Circus Of Heaven" when I went for walks a decade ago.

I thought We Have Heaven was an OK-ish dry run for Anderson's Olias of Sunhillow, which was also part of a "let's all do solo things" project thinking about it. Five Per Cent of Nothing just about beats Ramshackled if we're making comparisons. Squire was the winner both times though, Fish Out of Water is almost the great lost Yes album.

Fish Out of Water loses me a bit on the last orchestral track, but it is interesting to hear Squire's lead voice and his take on the Yes sound.

5% for Nothing is a perfect 30 second song, but Ramshackled is way way down on my listening list.

I wish Anderson had done more like "We Have Heaven", I think he might have used more loops on one of his later solo albums but not sure.

this should come packaged in a vacuum bong

https://www.musicglue.com/yes-union-30/products/yes-union-live-limited-edition-super-deluxe-flight-case-30-year-anniversary-edition

Union tour was the only time I saw Yes live, and it was deeply disappointing

Utterly baffling that they are releasing this and thinking it's something their fanbase wants. Their fanbase wants tours released, certainly; Progeny was proof of that. But they want good tours of the band in their prime, and Union is not that. I can't imagine listening to 30 discs of shows from that tour. This isn't King Crimson.

'union' had its own section in the used bin at my local record store circa '92

I don't think any of the Union live albums have had much tracks from the studio album. I've wanted something like that because Wakeman felt the studio album was butchered but was proud of the live performances, but this is too much.

I saw them twice on the Union tour, lol.

Yikes yeah this is just overblown — even for Yes !

You know what would’ve been cool for them to have played on this tour? “Machine Messiah”. Howe and Rabin would’ve sounded nice together on that. Because otherwise I hated when they were forced to play together. Oil (Rabin = motor oil) and water.

coming quickly to terms

I just BLASTED "Parallels" at plate-tectonic volume, then followed it with "Hold Out Your Hand" from Squire's Fish Out Of Water. If you're gonna get Yessed out, this is definitely a recommended venture

for real there's such an inherent joy to the way Wakeman plays on "Parallels"

I think it's the ending of "Parallels" on Yesshows where Wakeman sounds like he just went full Keith Moon on everything.

At the very least, the giant Union box should include the argument of Howe telling Peter Banks to fuck off backstage at the LA Forum.

Was just thinking how funny it would be if the current line up went out on tour and only played the ABWH album and Union.