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.