Yes - Close to the Edge (1972)
 

This is a discussion for the Yes' legendary album "Close to the Edge" from 1972. It was the PFAC homework for week 32, but of course anyone should join in!

If you forgot which album it is, here's a recap of my little write-up :

So .. What do you think about it? :)

There's not much that i can say about it that that review didn't explicitly state. Great write up. For as many times as I've listened to this album, I'm astonished that I've been completely unaware that it's concept is based on Herman Hesse's Siddartha, one of my favorite novels of all time. Knowing that fact alone will add such an amazing amount of depth and dimension to an album I've loved immensely for a very long time. I need to give it another spin right now.

It's no secret I have a lot of love for this album :D I see it's currently beaten by Genesis' "Selling England by the Pound" as the top album in progarchives' list of the 100 best prog albums ever and I can't understand why .. To me, it is my all-time favourite prog album.

There are some particular things I think it does well. I think that the concepts the record deals with, the circle of life stuff and spiritual awakening and so on - is incredibly ambitious. Yet, they've executed it in an almost flawless way. Everyone who knows a bit of Yes know the almost religious heights their music can reach. With such a difficult concept, their sound is the perfect marriage. This album has an interesting dynamic in that it builds up and tears down. The music builds up and becomes structured until a counter-melody mixes things up or the whole song suddenly becomes abstract and fleeting again (ex. 8:30 minutes into the title track). Musical themes come, go and then come back again. Yes are by far not the only ones to do this of course, but on this album they did it particularly well, I think, and again it really fits the overall theme.

Also, although some criticize them, I quite like Jon's lyrics. The continuing references to the sun, valleys, rivers etc. throughout the album is genius. I don't mind the abstract lyrics and the symbolism either. Tackling the themes without those tricks would've been pure stupid.

Overall, I just think it's a beautiful album with a lot of lovely harmonies. The beautiful bits are the ones I appreciate the most and everything else going on mixes things up a bit and makes it a little more interesting. My favourite song these days is actually "And You And I". I think it's a brilliant piece of music from it's first sound to the very end ..

And you and I climb, crossing the shapes of the morning.
And you and I reach over the sun for the river.
And you and I climb, clearer, towards the movement.
And you and I called over valleys of endless seas.

Ahh .. :D

Of course I love the title track and Siberian Khatru as well, but I guess I can save some love for subsequent posts.

This is by far my favorite Yes album and favorite progressive rock album. I just love the baroque keyboard solo in Siberian Khatru.

Brilliant! Brilliant! Brilliant!

my favorite prog album and possibly my favorite album overall.

one of the highlights for me is around the 14:45m mark of "close to the edge" with the incredible organ solo by wakeman which is complemented brilliantly with the guitar + bass. also, around 6:15m of "and you and i" when the acoustic guitar suddenly intervenes. this moment never fails to put a smile on my face(and depending on my level on introspection, brings tears). "siberian khatru" is certainly the most accessible track on the album and the highlight for me is the keyboard solo that pomegrant noted(around the 3m mark).


PS: has anyone ever found a flac copy of this?

This is the only Yes album I've heard, and it's pretty damn awesome. Only thing I don't like about it is the particularly spazzy intro to the title track... aside from that it's all good.

EDIT: Also, can remember a particularly funny story my dad told me - this came out when my dad was still in school, and apparently one of the kids had heard this song and thought the lyrics were the most incredible form of poetry, and decided to read out the whole thing, in it's entirety, at some social club meet or something of that sort... with all the repetitions of 'I get up, I get down'.... spoken word :P

Weird thing is, I hadn't heard anything about it being a concept album (as admittedly, I havn't looked into the background of this album that much) but my dad was under the impression that the lyrics were basically just made up out of nothing, apparently from some interview he read or something.

i adore the spazzy intro... the backing guitar work is a brilliant little loop and the song just keeps building for the next few minutes until they tear it down.

Hehe, I did call it a concept album and my reason for doing so is really nicely summed up in this bit of quotation from Wikipedia :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_to_the_Edge_(song)

Whether or not other prog rockers think of it as a concept album, I don't really know!

A classic. I am amazed every time I listen to it how fast it goes through those songs. They honestly feel like average length songs, but they are all around 10 minutes or more. It was actually this album along with Selling England by the Pound that really kick started my prog phase.

The interesting thing for me about CttE is how, besides the themes of enlightenment and such, the structures of the three songs themselves are utterly impeccable and full of little nuances beyond the technicality involved. The title track itself reminds me a lot, for example, of those creation stories you read about in various mythology: it spends a few minutes burbling in chaos and dissonance at the beginning before coming together in a big "eureka" moment around 2:54 or so. Or the layered guitar outro in Siberian Khatru, etc. etc.

Hence, what makes CttE special and untouchable for me are not the lyrical themes, execution nor even the musical themes, but the bloody genius of how each track seems extensively whole and self-referential despite their long lengths. Much like some of the best classical music centuries ago, the architecture and coherence that's gone into this album is simply flabbergasting to me even now. Especially when you compare it to a lot of today's standards in prog. and songwriting on the whole. xD

^Brilliant post, Anty :D I know what you mean!

I'm a big fan, and yes since the 70s and made his concert to see them do this song again and again had the opportunity. The best album of close the edge from Yes, it's my favourite and in more than 35 years has been a mainstay of progressive rock.

The neat thing is that while the songs on CTTE are longish, the album itself is just 38 minutes, which makes for a rather quick and breezy listen with not a second of wasted space, particularly in an era of releases that are more CD length and padded accordingly. I've noticed shorter albums returning in the last few years and that is a welcome trend to me.

Yeah, my opinion is if you are going to make an album longer than an hour every single minute better be pure gold. Very few bands have pulled this off for me. I really do prefer 30-40 minutes of awesome music to 75 minutes of average crap.

I had a magic moment one day ....... I was playing the title track to my daughter and when it came to the quiet bit in the middle we both said ......

'It sounds like water dripping off a leaf in a rainforest'!

This is indeed such an amazing album.

Close to the Edge has always been one of those albums that I just knew was brilliant. To shed some light on that, I got this album along with an Aerosmith Greatest Hits album and Tool's 10,000 Days for my XXth birthday, and I immediately was in love with all three. Then I ditched Aerosmith. And soon after I considered Tool's Lateralus to be much more profound on every level, and I swayed away from 10,000 Days too. But it didn't matter how many other Yes albums I checked out, or even contemporary artists of Yes -- Close to the Edge always sounded bloody brilliant. Objectively now, sure, I can find a few faults that 'bug' me, but it's nothing that could ever jepoardize its position in my eyes. Its structure (both as a whole and in its 3 smaller parts) is mindbogglingly air-tight. The way that "Close to the Edge" juggles such intensities and such calms, constantly pushing back and forth is honestly not that easy.

It truly is written with the intent and grace of a symphony; The recurring themes, the different sections (allegros, andantes, etc.), the dynamics/subtleties, and the overall feeling of a massive statement. The ambitiousness of this album can not be overstated, and the fact that it follows through on those ambitions is surprising enough...

edit: When it comes to prioritizing quality, make sure to get this one in at least 320 kbps. Yes, you can appreciate it if it were at a lower bitrate and some people find audiophiles like myself a bit overbearing... But some of the nuances here just won't be found otherwise.

^^flac or nothing. i try to get them for all of my faves.

Exactly! I'll admit for some albums it defeats the purpose (Disintegration Loops) but consider me a nitpicker.

I get whatever I can in FLAC but for stuff like GY! BE I don't get anything but. Yes is one of those artists.

Of Yes' triumvirate of truly great early 70's albums (Yes Album, Fragile and CTTE), CTTE is my favorite. Yes used to get heavy play on NYC area AOR radio, but I was too young at the time to appreciate it. It was later in the early/mid-80's listening to my brother's scratched up LP's that I started to really gain an appreciation of that early Yes period. I have no favorite Edge song, since the entire album is one masterpiece. Which is why Tales of Topographic Oceans was such a disappointment by comparison.

CTTE > relayer > fragile > yes album = tales

*edit

I forgot about Relayer. I haven't heard it since my cassette broke in the mid-80's.

Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman were not original members.

The album "Close to the Edge" was probably one of thier best albums ever made in my opinion, followed by "Time and a Word".

I think you've misread the description.

At the time of it's creation refers to when the album was made, not when the band was made. ;)

Thanks for the poll. I really can't stop listening to this album. It's making me listen to more Yes

I must say, this may be my favorite album. Ever.

It and Tull's Thick as a brick are two of the greatest progressive rock albums of all time. Here's a part of the review I wrote of the album on my site. I don't want to bog down this post, but you find the rest in the link in my signature...

1972 was without a doubt the year of Progressive rock and the year of the side long epic. Just to name a few, you get three of the best progressive rock albums of all time in Yes’s “Close to the Edge (CTTE),” Tull’s “Thick as a Brick,” and Genesis’s “Foxtrot,” and their corresponding side on epics are the best the genre has ever produced...

Huh, always wondered what Yes was about. Glad I saw this thread and proceeded to check out the band and the album. Fantastic is all I can say.

try these







Having said that, I wish starship trooper was more concise.

Gotta tip in on this one too! CTTE was the first Yes album I ever bought (and heard) and it just blew me away at first listen. Imagine the first thing that hit me were those dynamite bass lines making way for the barbwire guitar frenzy during the first minute, only to be interrupted by "AAAAH" out of nowhere, and then again, "AAAAAH..DA! DA!", what the hell was that? This is crazy! And then the simplest of guitar lines played over the most complex chords. And the song hadn't even started yet! Those lead lines throughout the verses, which weren't even lead lines; every instrument were intertwined around each other and the choral vocal melodies as the marrow, reaching for repeated crescendos in the chorus. And when it got to a halt only to drift away into the most beautiful melodiy I've ever heard, harking back to the main hook I already had been acquainted with; "I get up, I get down", all coming to a celestial conclusion with a church organ. And then again, frenzy! Is this for real?! All coming to a conclusion that even today brings me to tears, when the final chorus line actually descends in contrast to the earlier occurences. How such small details can bring such an emotional impact upon you! (I actually find the live version on "Yessongs" inferior in that respect when it comes to the final climax where they repeat the ascending part instead of releasing the built up tension as they do on the studio version).

And then we of course have the most beautiful love song (really!) ever recorded by a bunch of artsy-fartsy snub-nosed intellectuals; "And you and I" is a perfect showcase of acoustic purity combined with bombastic lapsteel/synth fanfares. The chords and the melody are as simple as anything but it's set to an ingenious arrangement proving that Yes was and is the number one prog band once and for all. He who claims prog rock has no heart, soul or feeling is just thick as a brick and he surely hasn't heard Yes.

This was a world unto itself and I couldn't wait to explore the vast landscapes of progressive rock (which I much later learned was the term). The next one I got hold of was "Relayer", but that's another story.

It's nice to see how this story is repeated in some form so many times in the past and continues to be in the present as new people discover this marvel of an album. Brilliant write-up dotoar and welcome to our little prog community on MusicBanter. :)

Pure genius

it's my favourite Yes album, followed by Relayer and 90125

90125 just because The Art of Noise are on it

If you haven't listened to CTTE yet, you're in for a real treat. One of my all time favorites. (:

Close To The Edge, would hold "1st Place" with me.

CTTE is one of the greatest albums. I love returning to this album every so often and letting the music wash over me anew.

Brilliant and I never use the word.