I believe one is in the works now but Jon won't be on it, their current singer is some canadian guy, can imitate Jon's voice pretty well but doesn't have the range or power he does.

Overall I think it's gonna suck.

His name is Benoit David and he comes from a Yes tribute band:laughing:

I'm pretty much in agreement with Anteater that they should have gone with the Starcastle guy instead.

For those who don't know, Starcastle were a 70s prog band and a straight up shameless ripoff of Yes in pretty much every way, but a pretty damn good one nontheless.



The band is still around and their most recent album Song of Times (2007) is argubly the best Yes album in the last 30 years. :laughing:

the 20 minute tracks have kept me away for quite some time now. tonight i hear for the first time:
http://img.maniadb.com/images/album/149/149216_f_2.jpg
i'm excited.

initial impressions: it's paced shitty at times but it has some great great moments. no idea why i haven't listened to this before. the ritual drum solo is so derivative of can's halleluwah.

I agree with you on the pacing. I think that is the reason it was so hard for me to get into it. It was definitely the most challenging Yes album for me. Once my brain was accustomed to what they were doing with the music, though, I realized it is a brilliant album.

Yeah, Tales isn't as good as The Yes Album, Fragile, CTTE or Relayer. Of the 4 songs the only one I don't like that much is The Ancient which keeps Tales from achieving the consistancy of their 4 better albums, it has some fine moments but it does seem random and slapped together, things don't flow together like they do on the other tracks.

And yes, the other 3 tracks are excellent, I don't find them boring at all despite their length, they're not quite as classic as other Yes epics like Close to the Edge or The Gates of Delirium but they're close enough.

The drum part from Ritual does remind me of Can but Trace I think Aumgn is the song you're thinking of. IMO Yes pull off the idea much more successfully. I will never understand why Tales is so criticized for being excessive and not Tago Mago, an album that didn't need to be a double album at all.

With Tales, if Yes made it today the album could have just had the 3 great tracks but back then you couldn't release a 3 side LP, how would that work? :laughing:

probably because can is considered more experimental than yes. because yes has some "hits"(at least stateside) and are generally more well-known.

some of tago mago is excessive, but i love most of it. definitely better than tales but both are great. in my mind, i kind of think yes wanted to make the tracks that long to prove how badass they were(and to deliver a big fat fuck you to all the naysayers). they didn't quite pull it off, but it's obvious they but forth a great effort.

Being more "avant garde" doesn't make something better.

Yes are not avant garde or anything and their music always has a strong sense of melody but they're not a band that played it safe either, at least not in their prime which was the 70s.

Most progressive rock bands are not inaccessible enough to be avant garde though some like Henry Cow and Can do fall into that category, prog was more about elevating rock and pop music to a more sophisticated level. Bands like Yes did indeed achieve a lot of commercial success in the early 70s but they still took many risks while at their peak, I think when bands like Yes experimented there was more risk than when an obscure group does it, the negative reaction becomes much more severe.

your question was why they were criticized for it. that was my response.

this is basically what i said.

Lol ok sorry about that.

I found The Yes Album completely randomly in my Dad's CD collection (along with ELP's self-titled and 3 Pink Floyd Albums. Woot!) This one was my favorite out of all of them. It seems like Anderson meant his voice to be another instrument, with the lyrics kind of being nonsensical, but very pleasing to the ear. I like that a lot. Starship Trooper was amazing, and Yours is No Disgrace and Your Move (the second half of that song is too damn repetitive for me) were pretty sweet too.

I'll try to pick up Close to the Edge and Fragile when able.

i can help, you need the former especially. i also recommend this thread if you feel like trying some more prog. my favorite prog albums other than close to the edge:

gentle giant: octopus
comus: first utterance
genesis: selling england by the pound

Only Yes album I've listened to is Close to the Edge. What to listen to next?

probably fragile or the yes album. my 2nd favorite behind CTTE is relayer, but it is much harder to digest.

As much as I love what these guys used to be and cherish the back catalog they are kind of a joke now. Tribute band singer? Are they taking career advice from Journey or what? I wish they'd get Jon back, do a farewell tour and then call it quits.

Should have called it quits about 15 years ago, as they had long run out of ideas by then. Leave cracks about Journey out of this:laughing:

I thought the tours from 1997-2004 were quite enjoyable and while they didn't make any music that can stand shoulder to shoulder with their seventies output I think that much of the music on Keys To Ascension, The Ladder and Magnification was quite respectable for a thirty-year-old band.

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The live/studio Keys to Ascension and Magnification were competent enough but The Ladder pretty dire. It sounded like a cut and paste job of their earlier stuff, with a some new random ideas chucked in.

Does everyone love the slide in 'And You And I'?
I went to see them in Melbourne in 2004 and when Steve did that solo I thought it was one of the best musical moments ever for me and a little tear may have rolled down my cheek....... :)

Apparently they have a new album: "Fly From Here" that has leaked. I'm putting off listening to it until I catch up on my backlog.

their first album is quite good too

They have a new album out. I just started listening through a playlist on YT. It's decent.

Official website for the progressive rock band YES

Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...WiW8Mtvy5iIQyd

I just... no I really couldn't. I'll just stick with my Yessongs.

This iteration of Yes is Steve Howe, Alan White, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison and Billy Sherwood. Temper your expectations accordingly.

I listened to the first 4 songs. The problem with all these aging-rocker albums is that they tend to sound like generic versions of the stuff from their youth, but without any of the edge, and this album is no different. Compounding the problem is that modern recording and production techniques make everything sound so sterile and over-produced.

I think I feel asleep.

"Dare To Know" does nothing for me. It's neither great nor is it horrible; it's just there.

Trying to analyse my problem with it, is that it sounds unmistakably like Yes, vocals-wise, production-wise, and even in the way the sound jumps around musical styles. The problem is that the structure of the music - the tune motifs and the chord changes - do not live up to the adjective "progressive". There is just too much repetition and predictability. The terribly preachy nature of the lyrics does not help. It sounds almost as though Yes hired someone like Red Hot Chilli Peppers to supply a song for Yes to record.

Yes is not Yes without Trevor Rabin. I've seen them in concert exactly 4 times, all with Trev, from 1984 to 1994. And Yes without Jon, is well, not even worth mentioning.

I haven't even bothered with any of the albums they put out after Magnification because of the lack of Jon, it's not that I think a Yes album absolutely can't be done without him, I like Drama quite a bit but I don't think of it as a proper Yes album so much as some Yes/Buggles hybrid supergroup. Plus Trevor did his own thing, he had a kinda similar voice to Jon but he didn't imitate him, they made it work.

But now they got a guy who tries SO HARD to be Jon and even has the same first name. It's like they replaced Jon with a younger robot clone version of himself, it's so forced it reeks of desperation, sure a lot of boomer bands end up this way becoming complete husks of themselves but as someone who has championed this band for so long it really makes me sad.

And now Chris Squire is gone. Chris was the one guy who was always there and his bass playing is the heart of the band. Yes died with him.

No

This place hasn't changed at all lol.

This is probably the best remnant of what Yes used to be, even without Steve and Chris. Lee Pomeroy does a fantastic job, check out Heart ot Sunrise at about 51:40:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTk7KmCNOJE

The RRHOF performance had Steve included when they were inducted during that ^ tour, but they were off mostly because of Steve's performance from what I could tell. It seemed his vocals detracted from Jon's and his playing wasn't quite what it used to be. Trevor held a lot of it together.

I thought the RRHOF performance was great actually. Especially when they did Roundabout.

If they brought back that lineup with Jon, Rick, Steve, Trevor, Alan and Geddy I would be on board in a heartbeat.

It seemed a bit rough around the edges, but yeah it was still really good. Just not as polished as the tour footage.

Yeah that's me too: post-seventies Yes - Big Generator, 90125, Union and the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe album, which is a Yes album in all but name.

For your viewing pleasure:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWnr8Rm6mQU

Well this aged poorly, RIP Alan. :(

Last few clips I've seen of Steve you could tell he was struggling to keep up with his old frantic self.

Recently saw a clip where during a sound check he completely went off on a spot dude who was missing his mark. No yelling, just really demeaning stuff in that snobby British way. Lost a ton of respect for one of my top 5 fiddle heroes that day. :(

80s Yes. I'm in a big minority in liking the 2nd album by that lineup better than 90210.

Yeah that's an old clip, I saw it years ago, he definitely comes off as a douche but apparently he always had a reputation of being the cranky one of the group.

Jon on the other hand always seems like the chillest guy.