{"id":41179,"date":"2008-10-25T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-25T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/tales-from-yesterday\/"},"modified":"2008-10-25T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-25T00:00:00","slug":"tales-from-yesterday","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/tales-from-yesterday\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales From Yesterday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given the controversy<\/a> over the upcoming is-it-really-Yes-or-no tour<\/a>, it seems only fitting to review an album of Yes music made by a melting pot of Yes members and admirers. \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Assembled by prog-friendly Magna Carta back in 1995, with liner notes from the editors of Notes From The Edge<\/i><\/a>, Yes\u2019 own fan newsletter, Tales From Yesterday<\/i> is a sort of love letter to Yes music, featuring contributions from individual Yes members past, present and future (Steve Howe, Patrick Moraz, Peter Banks and Billy Sherwood), Yes contemporaries (Annie Halsam), Yes admirers (Robert Berry, Magellan, World Trade, Shadow Gallery, Cairo, Enchant, Spock\u2019s Beard) and even Yes offspring (young Adam Wakeman\u2019s band Jeronimo Road).<\/p>\n

The end product of such an amalgamation of different musical personalities is almost inevitably going to be somewhat uneven.\u00a0 The interest naturally arises mostly in what the various players choose to change or retain from these song\u2019s often-complex original arrangements.\u00a0 This in itself is ironic since, as Mike<\/st1:personname> Tiano and Jeff Hunnicutt appropriately observe in the liner notes, \u201cYes have always created imaginative arrangements, first evident in their renditions of others\u2019 songs.\u00a0 Yes didn\u2019t simply cover tunes, they turned them inside out\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Would their friends and disciples do the same?<\/p>\n

Well\u2026 (get ready for it) \u2026yes and no.<\/p>\n

Among the chance-takers is Robert Berry (of 3, a.k.a. Emerson, Berry & Palmer), who takes the group\u2019s trademark \u201cRoundabout\u201d in a Dream Theater direction, playing up the power chords and giving it a herky-jerky metallic rhythm that throws the cadence of the lyrics out of step with the music.\u00a0 It\u2019s not awful, just not very melodic, which was the essence of the original.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Multinstrumentalists Mike<\/st1:personname> Keneally and Kevin Gilbert (Sheryl Crow) team with Spock\u2019s Beard drummer\/vocalist Nick D\u2019Virgilio for \u201cSiberian Khatru,\u201d delivering a version that captures both the syncopated beauty and the interwoven vocal harmonies of the original, while adding the fun of finishing with a quick bar of \u201cHeart Of The Sunrise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steve Morse (Kansas, Deep Purple) covers two of Steve Howe\u2019s solo acoustic pieces (\u201cMood For A Day\u201d and \u201cClap\u201d) without adding a lot to either, and let\u2019s face it, they were never really Yes pieces to begin with, just sops to Howe\u2019s considerable (albeit justly earned) ego.\u00a0 Other than demonstrating yet again that Morse is a very proficient guitarist, there\u2019s not much point to these two tracks. \u201cDon\u2019t Kill The Whale\u201d was never a favorite of mine, and the Magellan version here does little to change my opinion.\u00a0 It\u2019s nice that they toned down Wakeman\u2019s too-shrill synths and pumped up the guitar, but the overblown vocals give back whatever ground the arrangement gained.<\/p>\n

The Steve Howe-Annie Halsam version of \u201cTurn Of The Century\u201d is as sublime as one might expect, though Alan White\u2019s delicate percussion work on the original is missed.\u00a0 Shadow Gallery contributes a rather prog-metal version of \u201cRelease, Release,\u201d an interesting direction to take it, but why would they keep the worst part of the original song, the fake crowd noise behind the bridge?\u00a0 Yeesh.\u00a0 World Trade gives a straight reading of \u201cWonderous Stories\u201d that tells you exactly why the band brought Billy Sherwood on as a full member a couple of years after this disc came out.\u00a0 Sherwood \u2013 who produces and plays everything but drums \u2013 understands exactly what makes this track tick and nails everything about it.<\/p>\n

Next up, Cairo<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> takes hero-worship to new heights with their spot-on rendition of \u201cSouth Side Of The Sky.\u201d\u00a0 I was amused to see the All-Music Guide slag Cairo<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> for not varying more from the original<\/a>; to me that just shows the writer doesn\u2019t really appreciate Yes music.\u00a0 Unlike some of the other selections here, \u201cSouth Side Of The Sky\u201d is not just a good song but a perfect song, a song so complex and brilliant and powerful that the band that authored it refused to play it live for almost thirty years because they found recreating it onstage such a daunting challenge.\u00a0 The fact that Cairo<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> takes this 100-mph heater on the outside corner and yanks it out of the park with one clean swing makes me want to run out and buy an album of theirs ASAP.<\/p>\n

One time Yesman Patrick Moraz fares the best of his former bandmates here with an absorbing solo piano rendition of the \u201cSoon\u201d segment from Relayer<\/i>\u2019s epic \u201cThe Gates Of Delirium.\u201d\u00a0 Neo-proggers Enchant (another Magna Carta house band) recreate Trevor Rabin\u2019s \u201cChanges\u201d with almost-eerie attention to every sonic detail; if you like the original, you\u2019ll enjoy this one (assuming you can tell them apart).<\/p>\n

Toward the finish, original Yes guitarist Peter Banks takes an instrumental run at \u201cAstral Traveler\u201d and blasts it into hyperspace as an inventive and entertaining guitar showcase.\u00a0 And finally, Jeronimo Road<\/st1:address><\/st1:street> closes things out with a version of \u201cStarship Trooper\u201d that can only be described as painful — a Ronnie<\/st1:personname> James Dio clone bellowing out the lyrics as the rest of the band butchers the music behind him.\u00a0 Ouch.<\/p>\n

Tales From Yesterday<\/i> is inevitably disjointed and some cuts are light-years more successful than others.\u00a0 But to this reviewer\u2019s ears, both the most faithful (Cairo<\/st1:place><\/st1:city>, World Trade) to the original recordings and the least (Moraz, Banks) share in the available kudos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5827],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-41179","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-various-artists","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41179"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}