••• YES albums poll ••• 3 votes •••

Fragile
Tales from Topographic Oceans
Close to the Edge

 

The Yes Album
Close To The Edge
Relayer

Best Wishes,
David

 

The first 3 are my favourites
There is imo a certain freshness with the hammond which got lost during the wakeman synthesizer years
But ofcourse fragile is also a very good album

 

1. Going For The One
2. Big Generator
3. Close To The Edge

 

Really interesting poll:

1) The lack of love for 'Tormato', although not totally unexpected, is quite striking. It polls just 16 votes -- half the number of 'Talk' and fewer than 'Big generator'. What an artistic dip in form from the band such a short time after their 'classic' period.

2) No album released in the last 23 years scores more than a meagre 10 votes. The poll virtually flat-lines for the last quarter of a century! Again, no great surprise, but I suppose I wasn't expecting the extent of the drop-off in values.

3) Nice to see 'Drama' hold its head up with a respectable 75 votes. It's not an album I personally play much these days, but it was perfect for 1980 and it only finally came off my turntable when 'Moving pictures' was released some nine months later!

 

Wow, I found someone else who likes "Big Generator". I think I posted my thoughts on this album earlier

 

Tormato;
As the Circus finally changed its invisible course,
a new world to be found.

“Oh, It was OK,
but there were no Clowns or Lions or Tigers,
no Bears no Candy Floss, Toffee Apples,
no Clowns”.

CIRKUS

 

I have to say, I’m somewhat surprised to see 90125 get so many votes. Now, I really like 90125, but it was my impression that people didn’t, and if they did they wouldn’t put it anywhere near the top.

 

Yessongs
Tales from Topographic Oceans
Going for the One

 

For me, there is a gulf between these and the rest.

 

I can't believe "Yesshows" has so few votes. Is it not one of the greatest live album ever? The 50 minutes of "Gates" and "Ritual" are spellbinding and Yes at their very peak.

 

No, it isn’t, because A) It’s only a double album, B) Every other problem with it stems from this. They tried to cover too many fantastic tours on one album, so as a result we didn’t get the real highlights, like a whole Big Medley, Awaken, Sweet Dreams, and as a result we only get most of the shorter songs such as GftO (great song, so not complaining, even though the transition from Time and a Word is awkward), Don’t Kill the Whale (eww, at least it’s better than the studio version), and Wonderous Stories (fine, but weirdly placed at the end). And that brings us to point C) The flow is awful. It opens fine with Parallels, the set opener for the GftO tour, and then we have the beginning of the Big Medley from the Tormato tour, Time and a Word, which then transitioned very awkwardly into Going for the One, whereas before it transitioned naturally into Long Distance Runaround. And that’s the end of side 1, a very strange side closer. And then we have Gates of Delirium, which is fine as a second side. Then for some reason we have Don’t Kill the Whale of all things to open side 3. In my opinion I think it should’ve opened with Turn of the Century or something, a far better song, and the album is sorely in need of a ballad. Then we have Ritual, which is split across two sides. I get that time constraints and sound quality are a thing on an LP side, but that doesn’t make it any less of an awkward thing. At least ELP did it right. All in all, the performances of course are mostly great, but it’s too mindlessly cobbled together imo. If it had had 4 LPs at least, then it may have very well been the greatest live album, but as it is, no, not by a long shot.

 

Ahh, only Yes fans would hear a double live album with sprawling 20+ minute opuses and say, "It's not nearly enough!"

 

Can’t help it if there’s so much great material out there.

 

Well, they had already done a triple live album and this was before the era of extended, multi-disc archival sets. I reckon that they did they best they could given the limitations of the format at the time, though I'm glad that we eventually got the Big Medley on The Word Is Live set.

 

Look at Return to Forever and Chicago for example with their 4 LP sets, 4 and 8 years before Yesshows respectively. Yes were very big in 1980, they could’ve pulled it off. It’s a fine album, it just could’ve been a lot better imo.