Favorite Yes Album
 

I feel like I've been a bit too absent from this forum lately, what better way to mark my return than to resume my role of annoying assh*le who never shuts the f*ck up about this band?

been a bit partial to the Yes Album and Fragile, but Close to the Edge still takes it by a highway mile.

For me.

Great:
1. Close to the Edge
2. Fragile
3. Relayer
4. The Yes Album
5. Tales From Topographic Oceans
6. Yessongs

Good:
7. Going For the One
8. Magnification
9. Drama
10. Time & A Word
11. 90120
12. Keys to Ascension 1 & 2

Meh:
13. The Ladder
14. Yes
15. Tormato

Crap:
16. Union
17. Open Your Eyes
18. Big Generator
19. Talk

Good poll ya got here Dr. Prunk. Make ones for KC and Gentle Giant too!! :laughing:

It was between Relayer, Fragile, and Close to the Edge. I went with the latter.

It's difficult to choose between these 6, so I wont.

Relayer and The Yes Album are interchangable for me now that I think about it.

The first Yes song I ever heard (aside from Owner of a Lonely Heart, which I didn't know was a Yes song at the time) was Leave It, I thought it was a neat pop song so when I found this

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/yes/30-1.jpg

5 years ago at a record store, I decided to buy it, and that's how my love affair with this band started.

I also have this album, it's a great compilation. I don't normally buy greatest hits album's, but this in an exception I'm glad I made.

I love the third disc of bonus tracks that the band made specifically for that compilation.

My favorite is the acoustic version of South Side of the Sky.

Yeah i'm not a huge fan of the 'Roundabout' version though. Also 'Australia' was cool too.

Show Me is a pretty little ballad too.

And yeah. Steve Howe's acoustic stuff is always ftw.

Without a doubt, he's widely underrated.

He's my favorite guitarist. Hands down. The stuff he does with a pedal steel is just godly.

I guess it's time to download Close to the Edge, unless you can share it, boo boo.

This thread inspired me to eventually download some Yes. What appeals to people about this band?

It's hard to say.

But for me it's a lot of things.

They're all great musicians with their own trademark styles and personalities that comes out through the music to create their distinctive sound. A sound that would best be described as "alien". Roger Dean really was the appropriate guy to do their album art, their music sounds like what his art looks like.

Their lyrics are pretty blah, but they're one of those bands that use words for how they sound rather than what they mean. People use this as an example of their pretentiousness. But it's hardly different from what mid 60s era Dylan or Cobain have done on a regular basis.

Ok I'm ranting. So anyway. Things I like most about Yes.

The classical structure of their very best work, they do more "Rock suites" than any other band, it's another reason people write them off, but those kind of songs tend to be my favorite. They have five 20 minute songs and I don't find a single one of them boring. The way they use recurring themes and motifs, segue between something that's completely chaotic to something that's absolutely beautiful (the Soon segment from The Gates of Delirium for example) and the way they can fuse so many musical styles into a single song and make it fit. I consider Yes the definitive band when it comes to epics. Weither you love em or hate em really depends on weither or not you like that kind of thing. They'll certainly test your attention span.

The funny thing is normally I consider my attention span to not be that great at all, yet Yes just has something that pulls me in and keeps me fascinated.

They're an ensemble band, rather than being a band where one member stands out, they all stand out.

Steve Howe as I have said is my favorite guitar player, he has a very country and jazz influenced style which adds some much needed spunk to the band. He usually plays a Gibson ES-175, and the sound he gets out of it is incredible.

Jon Anderson is not a technically amazing singer or anything, but I love his voice. I guess I have a thing for falsetto vocalists. The vocal harmonies though is probably my favorite thing about the band's sound overall.

Chris Squire is one of my favorite bassists, along with McCartney and Entwistle he also deserves a lot of the credit for popularizing the idea of bass guitar being more than just part of the rhythm section. He has a distinctively "fuzzy" sound.

Yes have had a lot of talented keyboardists come and go like Tony Kaye, Patrick Moraz and Geoff Downes who helped shaped the band into various musical directions. But it was Rick Wakeman who really completed the band. What Hendrix is as a guitarist is what I like to think of Wakeman as a keyboardist, he's just the best. I can't really explain it, but the sound of moogs and mellotrons, it's like herion if you're a serious proggie.

And Bill Bruford > Neil Peart.

There's just a an emotional connection I have with their music, it's hard to explain (and it has nothing to do with their lyrics) but it's an almost spiritual kind of thing.

So there you go. My totally fanboyish response to a simple question.

I am in the unfortunate position of hearing 90125 and loving it at least 4 years before I heard any other Yes albums even though I know that it's not generally what they are all about. However I will be cliched and say Close to The Edge as it's damn solid all the way through.

Yes almost have two different identities, there's people who know them as a prog band, and then there's some people who aren't even aware of the prog stuff, because a lot of people who've been born since the 80s were introduced to them through 90125.

A lot of Yes fans (every band has some douchebags for fans) dismiss the album because "that's when they sold out". Regardless of that, it's a damn good album by 80s pop standards. Of course the worst of prog fans are quick to dismiss anything with the "pop" label, anything.

I used to never hear their prog stuff on the radio, just stuff off of 90125 like Owner of a Lonely Heart, Leave It and It Can Happen, which annoyed me, but now I hear Roundabout, Starship Trooper, Long Distance Runaround, I've Seen All Good People and Sweet Dreams getting played a good deal. I still like Owner of a Lonely Heart, it's just annoying that it's the song so many people associate Yes with. Kinda like how some people always associate Radiohead with Creep, but even more annoying.

Yeah I agree but it is a shame as tracks like Changes with that incredible opening and City Of Love with the great bass line show a really good album. The same could be applied to Gilmour era of Floyd too. I still like Tormato though :(

Tormato is meh for me.

Arriving UFO and Circus of Heaven are pretty awful, Don't Kill the Whale is too but in a so bad it's awesome kind of way. Release Relase and Future Times/Rejoice are not bad.

The two really good songs on the album are the last two tracks, Onward, which is a corny but lovely ballad, and Silent Wings of Freedom, which has some of the most awesome bass ever.

Squires excellent bass playing is the highlight of the album. What ruins it for me is the cheesy overblown production, the sounds of Wakemans synths on this album is just awful. Also the astonishingly awful lyrics. Not that Anderson was ever good lyricist, but at least up until this point it didn't matter, because you had no idea what they f*cking meant anyway, here you know what Anderson is trying to say (he wants to save the whales), and lets just say that Yes are a band who should just let the music do the talking.

To be fair I am not into a huge amount and some days anderson's voice just does my trolley in to be fair. What did you think of Talk? I thought that there was a couple of OK tracks on there I Am Waiting and the 3 parter Endless Dream are good tunes.

It's their worst album IMO.

The Calling = Worst Yes song ever.

Really? Worse than Big (bollocks) Generator?

Everything post-Drama is utter hogwash, 90125 being the exception.

I think Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe should be included in the list. It really is an awesome album. Who needs Chris Squire when you have Tony Levin !?!?!
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/c...akemanHowe.jpg

Fixed.

Trevor Rabin should die a horrific death

He's a good guitarist and he was good on 90125, but yeah he really participated in the worst of the worst.

I'm with Anteater and his "everything post Drama sucks" philosophy, except I make no exception for 90125 and I love ABWH.

Close to the Edge takes the cake for me.

Have you heard Magnification and if so how could you not like it?

Keys to Ascension 1 & 2 are also very good, a mix of live and studio stuff.

Well, you got me there. I haven't heard it.

I have. It sucks; you can't replace Wakeman with an orchestra and just expect things to be on par with the glory days, because it isn't.

That's really awful logic. It sucks because Wakeman's not on it?

Uh... So Fragile, CTTE, Tales and GFTO are the only good Yes albums? Yeah, you couldn't be any more wrong.

I liked the Orchestra element but even if you don't, who cares if there's no Wakeman? It's their first good album since 90125. You're overstating Wakeman's importance a good deal, it's not as essential as say Howe, his return to the band really made a hell of a difference, The Ladder was meh but it was an improvement over everything before it, and Magnification was the point where they wisely dropped the 80s arena rock stuff for good.

i dont think thats what he was trying to say, more like it's not the same without wakeman... i agree.

Christ, give me a break here. No, its not JUST Wakeman's absence, its also the unfortunate fact that the songs on a compositional level lack the oomph of their 70's material (the title track and In the Presence Of being prime examples). Lots of boom and bombast, yet completely and utterly devoid of the vibrance they had in their collective youth.

And as Crash figured out (unlike you) from my last past, yeah I don't feel Yes was really the Yes I loved anymore after GFTO (with Wakeman hitting the road and Anderson only popping up sporadically). Something was lost with the advent of a new decade, and they haven't gotten it back since.

Doesn't make it a bad album. Surely you don't think The Yes Album and Relayer are bad do you?


I never said it was on par with their 70s stuff, but it's by no means bad. If you think that album is bad, you haven't heard anything they've done from Big Generator up until that point.

But whatever, I love the album, different strokes for different folks.

I unfortunately have had the pleasure of hearing it about a year ago, with my verdict being that Big Generator, Union, etc make Magnification look like their magnum opus. :laughing:

No of course not, actually I would put Relayer 3rd or 4th on my top Yes albums list. But the sound is undeniably different. Which isn't bad it's just different.



Oh god.....



Holy face-palm time.