Review of Yes' The Yes Album

Released 1971

"Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever.
All I know can be shown by your acceptance
of the fact there shown before you".

I had a kind of subliminal awareness of Roger Dean's classic Yes logo from what feels like a very young age. As Yes were a major band, constantly in the music press and doing the stadium circuits during the mid seventies, somehow, given my tender years I seemed to know of Yes and their caped keyboard player, Rick Wakeman. I knew nothing about their music, just that they were a 'significant' band that existed just outside the mainstream. And for that reason alone, they interested me.

With a desire to delve further into the progressive rock world, and as I was reading anything and everything I could about the genre, I continually found references to the fact that Yes were revered proponents of the prog stable.

The Yes Album was my first Yes purchase based simply on the lack of availability of anything else in their catalogue in my home town. Having purposefully set out one day to purchase a Yes album, I was disappointed that the only one I could find didn't have a Roger Dean sleeve. I found the sleeve odd (and still do) and shrugged with resignation at the realisation that my previous theory about all prog rock albums being devoid of images of the band was clearly misguided. However disappointed I was about the sleeve, I went ahead with my purchase fully expecting to be let down by the music itself.

I wore a furrowed brow throughout the first airing of the album. This was very strange music. There were so many changes of time signature, of tempo and of mood in each song that it felt as though several different songs were being stitched together. The complexity of the instrumentation struck me at this time as pretentious. This concerned me greatly, as this was a common criticism hurled at the genre and especially at Yes themselves. On top of this, the bass was being used in ways I had never heard before; wandering all over songs, in what felt like the wrong places.

And then there was the voice and the lyrics. I had been told that you either loved or hated Jon Anderson's Lancastrian tenor stream of consciousness. On this first listen, I couldn't see myself falling into the former camp.

When the album finished, I put it away for a few days feeling as though I was out of my depth and perhaps simply too young to appreciate what many others felt was a worthy piece of music.

I have since learned that many great albums just don't work on the first listen. Some indeed take either many plays to register properly, or that you just have to be in the right mood and in the right place for it to 'click'. In the case of The Yes Album, my second listen worked due to the wearing of my headphones. When Steve Howe culminates the final part of Starship Trooper with a achingly wonderful piece of guitar work, I heard it entirely differently and was seriously impressed. Also, the first time around I hadn't picked up the 'subtle' interweaving of 'all we are saying, is give peace a chance' into the denouement of I've Seen All Good People. Now that I picked it up on the headphones, I could see that it was clever and that it worked.

Picking up these nuances made me listen more intently. It was then possible to be more receptive and respecting of Tony Kaye's keyboard work and to be impressed by the drummer, who clearly had jazz leanings. Very slowly, I even began to be drawn in by Jon Anderson's singing style. I couldn't make head nor tail of the lyrics, but I became enthralled by how the whole thing just worked. I wasn't hard to see why Yes' music divided music lovers in the way that it did, but I was delighted that now that it had clicked for me, I was moving into the inner sanctum of prog.

I still don't like the sleeve though.